Aiming to obtain the best possible results, scientists have striven to replace damaged articular cartilage with healthy articular cartilage.

This drives efforts to develop ways of using a person's own cells to grow, or re-grow cartilage tissue to replace missing or damaged cartilage.

Mosaicplasty, a form of chondral grafting, is a therapy designed to replace cartilage on the surface of the knee joint that has been damaged by trauma or arthritis by implanting osteochondral plugs.

The implants, Teflon-coated disks about the size of thumbnails that had been placed in his jaw joints to replace cartilage, have been eating away at his skull bones and causing pain for 15 years.

Bone starts to replace cartilage.

Total hip replacement surgery replaces damaged cartilage with new joint material in a step-by-step process.

(Doctors shave down shin and thigh bones and cement metal plates into both; they then replace damaged cartilage with plastic.)

Replace damaged bone and cartilage with implanted tissues or cells that can grow cartilage.

Treatment of shoulder arthritis is usually aimed at reducing pain; there is no way to replace lost cartilage except through surgery.

The human body cannot replace cartilage, so once the infection clears up, parts of the ear can actually collapse without the necessary support.