Abstract
Tendon injury is the most common disease in the musculoskeletal system. The current treatment methods have many limitations, such as poor therapeutic effects, functional loss of donor site, and immune rejection. Tendon tissue engineering provides a new treatment strategy for tendon repair and regeneration. In this review, we made a retrospective analysis of applying mechanical stimulation in tendon tissue engineering, and its potential as a direction of development for future clinical treatment strategies. For this purpose, the following topics are discussed; (1) the context of tendon tissue engineering and mechanical stimulation; (2) the applications of various mechanical stimulations in tendon tissue engineering, as well as their inherent mechanisms; (3) the application of magnetic force and the synergy of mechanical and biochemical stimulation. With this, we aim at clarifying some of the main questions that currently exist in the field of tendon tissue engineering and consequently gain new knowledge that may help in the development of future clinical application of tissue engineering in tendon injury.
Highlights
Mechanical stimulus has a huge impact on life activities, which is evident in gene expression, cell life activities, functions of living systems, and individual growth and development
They found that mechanical stimulation induced an increased proliferation and a similar morphology with tenocytes, and it increased the expression of tendon-related extracellular matrix (ECM) genes and proteins, which resulted in significantly improved mechanical properties of the engineered tendon [6]
Mechanical stimulation is an important regulatory factor in tendon tissue engineering, which can induce the differentiation of stem cells into tenocytes and improve the performance of engineered tendon constructs
Summary
Mechanical stimulus has a huge impact on life activities, which is evident in gene expression, cell life activities, functions of living systems, and individual growth and development. Mechanical stretching has been widely used in tendon tissue engineering to induce tenogenic differentiation, while mechanical compression is beneficial for osteogenic differentiation as well as for chondrogenic differentiation [3,4,5]. Applying mechanical stretching to engineered tendons could promote cell infiltration and proliferation [6, 7], induce the extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition and the collagen fiber alignment [6, 8, 9], and activate mechanically sensitive receptors which subsequently promote tenogenic differentiation [10,11,12]. We will make a retrospective analysis of the past decades in the field of applying mechanical stimulation in tendon tissue engineering, as well as the inherent mechanisms. The term tendon is related to both tendon and ligament in this review
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