The majority of the stuff is from cadavers and frozen. It's not just cartilage, we got frozen femur heads, feces for bad cases of c-diff, patella caps, random tendons, chips of bone, etc. You honestly do not know which one is better, Ball might have taken care of his knee a lot better than Landeskog did and why he's gotten better results. They (Ball/Gabe) might have gotten special treatment, but from the ones I work with, expiration date is a bigger issue for hospitals. Even frozen, a lot of these tissues do not have long expiration dates and must be used before it expires or the hospital has to throw it away. They cost a lot, I think one femur is around 1k I believe.
The problem with Landeskog is that the swelling isn't going down, meaning he has something called seroma or just the accumulation of fluid after surgery. Surgery tends to damage the surrounding lymphatic tissue, which brings about a lot of inflammation and where there is inflammation, there is going to be swelling. It usually decreases every 7-12 days or so (cartilage could take upwards of 12 months though). If you ever had major surgery, a lot of surgeons actually put in drainage tubes and bulbs for the recovery days. This is common for major ones like DIEP breast reconstruction, in which you can expect a lot of fluid considering the process of the surgery. So why isn't Landy's inflammation going down? The answer to that is probably two-fold; one, he played on his damage leg a lot and a ton of mileage, meaning he never really gave it a proper rest that chondrocytes need (time mostly). Second, and a good chance it is the money maker, the swelling isn't going down because he had a pre-existing condition before the surgery (aka the cut), which required him to get the surgery.
So it is a multifaceted pathophysiology approach that he's dealing with. He didn't allow cells that are very hard to heal to rest properly. The surgery could be successful, but because the condition was bad enough, it was never going to get back to where it originally was (constant swelling after strenuous activity). The rise of scar tissue is another factor which takes the place of the duty of the original cells. I also would not be surprised if he's suffering from some beginning stages of arthritis as well. Cartilage transplant isn't also very good for sports that involve twisting and running. Skating is a different form of running and twisting is a significant part of the sport (I would guess this is what is causing him fits with edge work). I forget who it was, but I read a comment on here ages back which said that Landeskog pretty much gave up his knee for us to win the Cup and in hindsight, good chance that is the case.
