Hi there, it's Dr. Grant Pagdin. Today I wanted to give you an update as to the status of our clinical research project using stem cells, either from your fat or from your bone marrow, for osteoarthritis. Now in this research project, we hope to enroll a total of 240 subjects and to date, so far I have enrolled 146. So we still have room for many more candidates and the type of joints that we are injecting include the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle.

Now this is still the only project of its nature in all of Canada. There are a couple of other facilities looking at knees and hips, but nobody is doing any research right now in Canada with the upper extremity. So here in Kelowna we have the ability to inject any of the major joints of the body with either a combination of PRP with fat or PRP with bone marrow or a third group gets the combination of PRP plus both fat and bone marrow.

So what we're trying to study here is two things, really. We want to know that these combinations are safe and we want to know how effective they are. Now, we had thought starting this project that the combination of getting the PRP with both the fat and the bone marrow might do a little bit better than either of the other two groups alone. Now so far that hasn't been quite how it has turned out so far.

Regardless of which treatment group the subjects get allocated to, they all seem to be doing equally well. And I have some statistics here for you. Based on our last annual report submitted to Health Canada, we have completed six months of follow-up on 156 joints. And out of those, 108 have reported a clinically meaningful improvement and that amounts to 69% of those subjects. Now, for people that have completed 12 months of follow-ups, that's a total of 146 joints. 62% of those subjects have reported a clinically meaningful improvement. And there are some of these subjects that we have now followed all the way out to 24 months. And the statistics at 24 months are steady. 62% of those subjects have still reported a clinically meaningful improvement at 24 months. So that shows you the type of response that we're getting in this research project. And it doesn't seem to matter how severe the arthritis is. It doesn't seem to matter how old the subject is and it doesn't seem to matter which of the different treatment arms they get allocated to. We're seeing these kinds of results. So there is a smaller percentage of subjects that are achieving a somewhat of an improvement in their pain or their function, but maybe it just doesn't quite get to the threshold of being a clinically meaningful improvement.

And finally, there are a small percentage of subjects that report that they had no improvement at all. So 40 of our patients to date have had to either have another procedure, like another kind of injection in their joint or a joint replacement. I think we've had a total of 20 subjects out of our 146 that have gone on to have a joint replacement surgery during the research study.

If you're interested in more information on our clinical research project, please get in contact with my office today and we'll be happy to send you some further information. Remember, we are here to help you live longer, better.