Abstract
To overcome cartilage injury, strategies have been developed in the last few years based on tissue engineering to rebuild the defects. Cartilage engineering is principally based on three main biological factors: cells (native cells (chondrocytes) or a more primitive ones as mesenchymal stem cells), scaffolds and functionalization factors (growth factors, mechanical stimulation and/or hypoxia). Cartilage tissue engineering strategies generally result in homogeneous tissue structures with little resemblance to native zonal organization of articular cartilage. The main objective of our work concerns the buildup of complex biomaterials aimed at reconstructing biological tissue with three dimensional cells construction for mimicking cartilage architecture. Our strategy is based on structures formation by simple and progressive spraying of mixed alginate hydrogel and human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC). In this work, the comportment of cells and more precisely their chondrogenic differentiation potential is compared to a traditional making process: the mold. We report here that spraying method allowed to product a scaffold with hMSC that confer a favorable environment for neocartilage construction.
Highlights
Healthy cartilage is a complex tissue with well-defined functions allowing principally harmonious movements of the articulations over the whole life
Whatever the kinds of culture, human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) were negative for leukocyte marker CD45, hematopoietic stem cell markers CD34 verifying the lack of contaminating hematopoietic cells
Alginate hydrogel is a polymer largely employed for it is very easy to use in cartilage engineering. [19,20] few investigations considered the organization of cartilage as a basis for the development of the stratified tissue engineering
Summary
Healthy cartilage is a complex tissue with well-defined functions allowing principally harmonious movements of the articulations over the whole life. The lack of blood vessels and the inability of chondrocytes (cartilage cells) to repair significantly tissue defects limit the response of cartilage injury. Tissue engineering aims at repairing or replacing damaged or diseased tissue which present a limited self-repair capacity like cartilage. The use of mature cell types such as chondrocytes is associated with several drawbacks. The limited availability, donor site morbidity, dedifferentiation and limited proliferative capacity urged researchers to study other cell types, mesenchymal stem cells, [3]. Hydrogels provide advantages as their capacity of shaping, supporting chondrocytic phenotype, transducing mechanical loads to cells and their biodegradability, [4, 5]. Up to now, few methodologies efficiently synthesizing stratified structures including viable specific cells interacting with a biofunctionalized environment has been proposed. An applicable technique that is able to deposit multiple cell types in 3-D without overt cellular damage is probably cell spraying [14]
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