Dr. Charles Mok explains three platelet growth factors: VEGF promotes blood vessel growth, PDGF recruits repair cells, and transforming growth factor drives stem cells into mature tissue. Platelet injections into arthritic knees show improvement in roughly 80% of patients.
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Dr. Charles Mok
2025-06-12
About 80%
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What's going on with the platelets. They have three growth factors that we're well aware of. One's called vascular endothelial growth factor. This promotes blood vessels and circulation to the region to help healing. The second one is pdgf, platelet derived growth factor. And this helps migrate cells into the area, cells that are needed to repair. The instance where you cut your skin, you need certain things that make collagen and to make epidermis, you need some stem cells to make your basement membrane, eventually make your keratin. We have another one called transformative growth factor, which causes this case, the platelets, for healing, and causes these stem cells to turn into mature cells. And when we inject this into the knee, which started over a decade ago, or into the arthritic joint, people get clinical improvement over time. Most people, about 80%, get some clinical improvement.