Before and after your NanoACi visit

How the NanoACi patient journey is structured

Getting NanoACi begins with a simple question: is this the right route for your joint? That question is answered in stages, each with a clear purpose, and the clinic manages the logistics at every step.

The first stage is a free fifteen-minute discovery call with a clinical coordinator. Its job is straightforward — to establish whether NanoACi is worth investigating for your situation and to address the cost upfront, so nothing is left vague before any commitment is made.

Imaging comes next. If you have an MRI taken within the last six months, you bring it. If not, London Cartilage Clinic arranges the scan and the consultation together, so the images are ready the moment you sit down with Professor Paul Lee — the surgeon who devised NanoACi, his surgeon-led, non-arthroscopic, needle-delivered, one-stage autologous chondrogenic injection technique.

The consultation is where suitability is confirmed. Professor Lee reviews the scans, examines the joint and makes the decision in person — it cannot be confirmed at any earlier stage.

The session itself runs in a clinic room, not a theatre, and takes roughly thirty minutes under local anaesthetic. Patients go home the same day. One follow-up appointment and a direct line to the team during recovery are included in the pathway from the outset.

What to bring and do before the appointment

Practical preparation for a NanoACi appointment is deliberately light. Three steps cover most of what patients need to do before they arrive.

The most concrete action is to locate any MRI taken within the last six months and bring it. If no recent scan exists, the clinic co-ordinates imaging and consultation together — as described in the pathway overview above — so the appointment is never delayed by a missing scan.

Before booking, an online suitability assessment is worth completing: eight focused questions covering cartilage pattern, mechanics, and imaging needs take roughly two minutes and produce a PDF to carry into the consultation. It is useful context rather than a formal gate — it helps frame the conversation with Professor Lee, not replace it.

The free fifteen-minute discovery call with a clinical co-ordinator is the natural first contact. It confirms whether NanoACi is worth investigating for a particular joint and gives a clear picture of the cost before any commitment is made.

Suitability itself is confirmed only once Professor Lee has reviewed the imaging at consultation — no earlier step produces a clinical verdict. Patients who arrive with their scan ready, their assessment PDF to hand, and their questions already formed will find the consultation can move directly to what matters: a specialist review of the joint and a clear answer about next steps.

Why NanoACi needs no surgical preparation

Traditional cartilage repair asks a great deal of the body before it can help the joint. General anaesthesia, hospital admission, a theatre booking, and an overnight fast are standard prerequisites for most surgical cartilage procedures — each necessary in its context, but each adding a systemic burden that extends the recovery before treatment has even begun.

NanoACi removes those prerequisites by design. Because local anaesthetic is sufficient for the entire thirty-minute session, there is no requirement for general anaesthesia — and without it, the theatre slot, the pre-operative fasting protocol, and the hospital pre-assessment all become irrelevant. Every on-the-day medication, including the local anaesthetic itself, is supplied and administered by the clinic. Patients arrive with nothing to prepare pharmaceutically and leave the same day.

This is what 'taking the operation out of cartilage surgery' means in practice — not simply a shorter procedure, but a fundamentally lighter encounter with the healthcare system. The awake, outpatient format is not a concession to a simpler technique; it is a consequence of a protocol designed, from the outset, to spare the body the demands that conventional cartilage surgery imposes. The same specialist judgement and biological precision remain; what is removed is the institutional apparatus that surrounds them.

What the session involves — and why it matters for recovery

Three biological roles are fulfilled in a single clinic room over roughly thirty minutes — and understanding each one helps explain why the body's response afterwards is measured in weeks rather than months.

While the patient settles, a small blood sample is taken and processed on the same day, in a sealed automated system, into platelet-rich fibrin. This is the signal component: a growth-factor-rich medium that both delivers the graft and primes the repair environment. At the same time, three 2.5 mm punches of elastic cartilage are taken from the concha of the ear under local anaesthetic. Auricular cartilage is progenitor-cell-rich in a way that joint cartilage is not — which is precisely why the ear, rather than the affected joint, is the donor site. The small marks heal within a week and are hidden in the fold of the ear.

These two autologous elements — the micrografts (seed) and the PRF (signal) — are combined at point of care with a ChondroFiller collagen scaffold, which provides the structural matrix (scaffold). There is no external cell-culture stage and no enzymatic processing. The combined graft is then delivered by needle to the joint.

Because no arthroscope is introduced and no cartilage surface is opened, the procedural footprint remains genuinely light. Improvement may begin between two and six weeks — a timeline that reflects the minimally invasive nature of the technique. The follow-up appointment included in the pathway is timed with that window in mind, giving Professor Lee the opportunity to assess meaningful progress at the point it can first be seen.

The follow-up structure included in the pathway

Structured support is built into the pathway from the moment the session ends. One formal follow-up appointment with Professor Lee is included in the all-inclusive price — timed to coincide with the window in which early progress can meaningfully be assessed, as noted in the previous section.

Between leaving the clinic and that appointment, patients are not left to navigate recovery alone. A direct line to the clinical team is included as standard: not a general enquiries desk, but a channel for questions specific to a patient's recovery as it unfolds. That continuity of specialist access matters most in the early weeks, when small uncertainties tend to feel largest.

Physiotherapy is quoted separately and sits outside the all-inclusive price; factoring it in as a parallel planning step is worthwhile before the session, so rehabilitation support is in place when needed.

The follow-up appointment itself is framed less as a discharge checkpoint and more as the opening of a longer conversation. Professor Lee's approach to cartilage care is built on a maintenance model — 'small, spaced, preserving touches over a lifetime' rather than a single definitive event. In that context, the included follow-up is the first structured point in an ongoing monitoring relationship, designed to protect and extend what the session has initiated.

How progress is measured over time

NanoACi 100 is the evidence programme through which Professor Lee tracks, reports, and refines outcomes for the complete three-part protocol — not as an afterthought, but as a structural feature of how the technique has been built from the outset.

Each of the protocol's components — autologous auricular cartilage micrografts, ChondroFiller collagen scaffold, and platelet-rich fibrin — carries its own body of published research. NanoACi 100 exists to establish how they perform together, in sequence, at point of care. The follow-up appointment included in every pathway is one of the mechanisms through which that evidence accrues: individual progress and the wider record of the technique's performance develop in parallel.

What this means in practice is that a patient's recovery is not simply managed and then discharged. Progress at follow-up is part of a prospective dataset designed to tell, with increasing rigour, what the combined protocol achieves over time. The programme is the clinic putting its commitment to measurement in writing.

For patients, the significance is straightforward: the pathway has been designed to ask itself whether it is working — and to keep asking.