Abstract
A vital ingredient for engineering bone tissue, in the culture dish, is the use of recombinant matrix and growth proteins to help accelerate the growth of cultivated tissues into clinically acceptable quantities. The skeletal organic matrices of calcifying marine invertebrates are an untouched potential source of such growth inducing proteins. They have the advantage of being ready-made and retain the native state of the original protein. Striking evidence shows that skeleton building bone morphogenic protein-2/4 (BMP) and transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) exist within various marine invertebrates such as, corals. Best practice mariculture and the latest innovations in long-term marine invertebrate cell cultivation can be implemented to ensure that these proteins are produced sustainably and supplied continuously. This also guarantees that coral reef habitats are not damaged during the collection of specimens. Potential proteins for bone repair, either extracted from the skeleton or derived from cultivated tissues, can be identified, evaluated and retrieved using chromatography, cell assays and proteomic methods. Due to the current evidence for bone matrix protein analogues in marine invertebrates, together with the methods established for their production and retrieval there is a genuine prospect that they can be used to regenerate living bone for potential clinical use.
Highlights
Key Issues in Regenerative OrthopaedicsRegenerative orthopaedics is the science of building and growing large amounts of natural human musculoskeletal tissue in the culture dish, with an emphasis on using stem cell precursors
Less intricate organisms at the base of the evolutionary tree such as, marine invertebrates may seem an unlikely resource for the bone tissue engineer, but they display a significant richness and diversity of intact frameworks, metabolic products, enzymes, signaling proteins, glycosaminoglycans, sterol lipids, extracellular matrix components and structural biomaterials that can usefully function in human physiology [9,10,11]
We can be increasingly confident that the approach, to harness proteins from marine invertebrate skeletons will be beneficial for strategies in bone regeneration
Summary
Received: 18 January 2013; in revised form: 13 March 2013 / Accepted: 1 April 2013 /
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