EpiBone stands out in the world of regenerative medicine as one of the few companies attempting something that sounds almost sci-fi: growing living human bone and cartilage outside the body. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in New Jersey, the company is reshaping how surgeons, patients, and the broader medical world think about skeletal reconstruction. Instead of relying on donor bone, metal implants, or grafts taken painfully from a patient’s own body, EpiBone is building a future where the skeleton can be repaired using newly grown, fully living tissue created specifically for each individual.
From Stem Cells to Living Bone: How It Works
At the heart of the company’s work is a deceptively simple question: if our bodies can naturally regenerate tissue, why not harness that ability in the lab to create entire grafts? That question guided scientists and engineers toward what eventually became EpiBone’s core technology. The company uses a patient’s own stem cells, combines them with advanced scaffolds, shapes those scaffolds into the precise geometry needed for a bone or cartilage defect, and cultivates the cells inside a bioreactor that mimics the body’s conditions. The result is a living, anatomically exact bone or cartilage graft that has the biological properties of the real tissue it aims to replace.
EpiBone’s process begins with imaging — CT scans that capture every curve, contour, and dimension of a patient’s bone defect. This digital blueprint becomes the template for creating a custom scaffold. Once the design is settled, the company collects mesenchymal stem cells, often from the patient’s adipose (fat) tissue. These cells are seeded onto the scaffold, placed inside EpiBone’s proprietary bioreactor system, and guided through a maturation process where they gradually transform into functional bone or cartilage. Over several weeks, what begins as a 3D-printed form becomes a living graft capable of integrating seamlessly once implanted.
Solving a Persistent Problem in Orthopaedics
The science is remarkable, but its significance becomes even clearer when viewed against the limitations of current skeletal repair methods. Traditional bone grafting often requires surgeons to remove bone from the patient’s hip or leg, creating pain and complications at the donor site. Allograft tissue from cadavers is limited, unpredictable, and carries risks of immune rejection.
Metal implants, although widely used, remain foreign objects inside the body and may weaken, loosen, or require additional surgeries over a lifetime. EpiBone’s living grafts challenge these constraints by offering something closer to biological perfection: tissue that belongs to the patient, behaves like the patient’s own bone, and is shaped precisely to fit.
From Lab Bench to Clinical Trials: Milestones & Progress
This promise has allowed EpiBone to move steadily from research into clinical application. In 2019, the company received FDA clearance to begin its first-in-human Phase 1/2 clinical trial for EB-CMF, a personalized bone graft designed for craniofacial reconstruction such as mandible repair.
The product is grown from each patient’s adipose-derived stem cells, eliminating the need for harvesting bone from elsewhere in the body. The clearance marked an important milestone not just for EpiBone but for the entire field of skeletal tissue engineering. Over the years that followed, the company expanded its pipeline to include engineered cartilage grafts. By 2023, it secured regulatory clearance to begin human trials of its lab-grown knee cartilage, an osteochondral graft intended for the treatment of joint damage — a condition affecting millions worldwide.
EpiBone’s journey has also been fueled by a combination of grants, venture backing, and strategic investments. By 2024, the company had raised tens of millions in equity and non-dilutive funding to advance its technology and initiate global clinical expansion. A recent financing round signaled strong investor confidence as EpiBone began preparing to extend its clinical trials into major international healthcare hubs. These developments are particularly relevant in a world where medical tourism and global demand for advanced orthopedic care are rising quickly.
Why It Matters — The Bigger Picture of Regeneration
What makes EpiBone especially intriguing is the broader context of its mission. If successful, the company’s work could transform how we treat trauma, congenital deformities, sports injuries, degenerative diseases, and cancer-related bone loss. Custom-grown grafts could give children the ability to receive bone that grows with them, athletes the chance to return to motion with living cartilage, and patients around the world access to personalized care without the limitations of donor shortages. The implications extend beyond medicine, touching on ethics, manufacturing, and the future of customization in healthcare.
Challenges on the Road Ahead
Yet EpiBone is the first to acknowledge that innovation of this magnitude comes with challenges. Scaling production of individualized grafts requires sophisticated bioprocessing, quality control, and regulatory oversight. Long-term clinical data will be essential to proving that regenerated bone and cartilage can stand the test of time. And transitioning surgeons from traditional methods to a completely new category of implants demands education, collaboration, and trust.
A Quiet Revolution in Progress
Still, the company’s trajectory points toward a paradigm shift already in motion. Regenerative medicine has reached a moment where the theoretical is becoming clinical, and EpiBone is one of the pioneers ushering that shift into reality. Its vision is bold but grounded in rigorous science, years of development, and a commitment to solving problems that affect millions of patients worldwide.
In an era where biotechnology companies come and go, EpiBone stands out not for hype but for its quiet, sustained progress toward redefining skeletal repair. It is a company not just building products, but cultivating a future where broken bones and damaged joints can be healed with living tissue grown just for you — a future where regeneration replaces replacement, and medicine begins to truly mirror biology itself.
Nina Tandon, CEO & Co-Founder
Dr. Nina Tandon blends deep scientific expertise with entrepreneurial vision, bringing more than two decades of experience in biomedical engineering to her role at EpiBone. She earned both her Ph.D. and completed postdoctoral work in stem cells and tissue engineering at Columbia University, where she also pursued an Executive MBA focused on healthcare entrepreneurship. Recognized by Fast Company as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business,” Nina is a TED Senior Fellow with a background that includes time at MIT and McKinsey. Outside the lab and boardroom, she enjoys yoga, skiing, and time with her young family. Her TED Talk on personalized medicine has resonated widely, garnering over a million views.
“We are strategically positioned to provide a superior bone graft that will provide exact defect repair, a simplified surgical procedure, improved bone formation and regeneration, and shorter recovery times, without the complications of foreign body implantation.”
