The news article, as well as the published work, state that:

Cartilage regeneration appears to occur through gene expression changes in pre-existing chondrocytes, rather than stem or progenitor cell proliferation.

Long-term side effects will need to researched of course and there might still be stem cells involved in the process, however that doesn’t seem to be the case according to what we know as of now.

Most definitely. I’m almost in that demographic myself and several of the slightly older, nerdy lifters at my gym talk about BPC-157 as something they would consider using.

If this gets proven to work in vivo in humans I’m certain we’ll see the same no matter side effects.