Translational medicine is collaborative science that translates work in the laboratory into practical medical treatments - it is sometimes termed 'bench to bedside medicine'. Because it often includes trials on animals it can be controversial.  So can animal testing be justified?

Scarlett MccGwire put on her wellies and met up with Francis Henson to find out.

Dr Frances Henson:  I'm Frances Henson, Research Fellow in the Division of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Addensbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and I am also Senior Lecturer in Equine Surgery, Department of Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge Veterinary School.

What I do is work in the lab with basic scientists to generate treatments for various orthopedic diseases.  I am interested in lame animals and lame people and we use a large animal model - a sheep - to try our experiments before we take them on to use them either to treat human patients or veterinary, animal, patients.

Our current research is looking at a novel bio-material.  I have colleagues in Newcastle who have made a brand new bio material, they have put two special materials together and they are going to be using those to treat large surface defects in joints - knee joints in people - that will also be applicable to our veterinary species.

Scarlett MccGwire:  You are trialing this on sheep?

FH:  Yes, we are.  What we do with these osteochondral plugs, as we call them, is we take our sheep, make little holes in the joints and we fill those holes with our novel treatmentt to prove that treatment is both safe and really offers a significant improvement in the expected outcome.  If you didn't put the scaffold in, the joints wouldn't heal.

SM: What are you finding out so far?

FH: We are finding that these new products are very good at treating joint surface defects.  Within our group, we have developed a novel way of looking at this.  We don't want these animals to suffer pain, so we monitor their pain, immediately after surgery and through the experiment because we do data analysis, recording the amount of weight bearing on the leg that has been operated on.  Interestingly we can show no difference in the animals we have operated on, compared to animals that have not been operated on, very quickly - within a matter of hours after the surgery.  The surgical procedures are very benign and the osteochondral plugs really allow the joints to heal very well.

SM: What does this mean for humans?  Will knee replacement surgery be much easier?  Is this the end of the pain of arthritis?

FH: Let's take these in two parts.  First, the early osteoarthritis.  Arthritis occurs when you have a defect in the joint, the joint is very ppor at healing itself and at the current time, if we have pain in our joint, the doctor give us painkillers and we limp around for a while until it is too painful and you go for a joint replacement (which is not a cure, it is amputation and putting in a prosthesis.

The joint surface defects we want to cure with the scaffold are big lesions in joint, due to sports injuries and trauma in road traffic accidents. These cause big damage in the joint and currently there is no treatment for that.  Left untreated it will go to arthritis.  We have the ambitious hope that using these scaffolds we can stop osteoarthritis before it starts, cure the joint and get it back to a healthy environment.

SM: We are using sheep to make incredible progress for humans?

FH: We are using our sheep to make incredible progress, I hope, in curing joint disease in both humans and animals.  I am a veterinary surgeon, I spend half my time in the lab, but the other half in my surgery with animals, particularly horses and the treatments we are developing are all part of a 'one health' agenda.