Post-traumatic osteoarthritis is a musculoskeletal disorder shadowing especially the life of young and active population. Inhibition of cartilage damage progression with early intervention is crucial. To predict how an intervention would affect the state of an injured knee joint, knowledge of biomechanical and inflammatory aspects of osteoarthritis progression is necessary. For the first time, researchers have now captured both mechanisms in a physics-based computational model predicting cartilage degradation and a possible recovery scenario after anterior cruciate ligament injury and reconstruction. The fruits of an international collaborative study (UEF, UCSF, CC, MIT) were recently published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research.