Abstract
For achieving early intervention treatment to help patients delay or avoid joint replacement surgery, a personalized scaffold should be designed coupling the effects of mechanical, fluid mechanical, chemical, and biological factors on tissue regeneration, which results in time- and cost-consuming trial-and-error analyses to investigate the in vivo test and related experimental tests. To optimize the fluid mechanical and material properties to predict osteogenesis and cartilage regeneration for the in vivo and clinical trial, a simulation approach is developed for scaffold design, which is composed of a volume of a fluid model for simulating the bone marrow filling process of the bone marrow and air, as well as a discrete phase model and a cell impingement model for tracking cell movement during bone marrow fillings. The bone marrow is treated as a non-Newtonian fluid, rather than a Newtonian fluid, because of its viscoelastic property. The simulation results indicated that the biofunctional bionic scaffold with a dense layer to prevent the bone marrow flow to the cartilage layer and synovia to flow into the trabecular bone area guarantee good osteogenesis and cartilage regeneration, which leads to high-accuracy in vivo tests in sheep . This approach not only predicts the final bioperformance of the scaffold but also could optimize the scaffold structure and materials by their biochemical, biological, and biomechanical properties.
Highlights
Knee osteoarthritis is a common and frequently occurring disease in the middle-aged and elderly population, including cartilage destruction and subchondral bone thickening (Peat et al, 2001)
As normal joints are formed by three parts, namely, the cartilage, subchondral bone plate, and trabecular bone, scaffolds were designed to mimic three layers of the bone in compliance with structural and mechanical properties
Considering only osteogenesis of the scaffold, the layer made by poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) for cartilage regeneration would not be well-discussed in this article
Summary
Knee osteoarthritis is a common and frequently occurring disease in the middle-aged and elderly population, including cartilage destruction and subchondral bone thickening (Peat et al, 2001). It ranks first in causing disability in the elderly and seriously affects the quality of life. Osteochondral scaffolds act as an osteoconductive part and serve as delivery vehicles for cytokines like bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), providing osteoinduction (Groeneveld et al, 1999). Osteogenesis and bone mesenchymal stem cell (BMSC) attachment occur after the implantation of the scaffolds
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