David Flanigan is director of the Cartilage Restoration Program and associate professor with the Department of Orthopedics at Ohio State.
In 2015, Flanigan was part of a team of Ohio State surgeons who became the first in Ohio to treat knee cartilage damage using healthy cartilage regrown from a patient’s own cells. Cartilage is necessary to maintain painless mobility in joints, but it has limited capacity to repair itself once injured. Cartilage damage leads to patients needing continuous procedures and treatments. Using a patients’ own cells to grow healthy cartilage improves long-term outcomes for patients who otherwise would have undergone microfracture surgery.
He is the recipient of the Richard O’Connor Award from the Arthroscopy Association of North America (AANA).