| Summary: | Articular cartilage is a dense connective tissue that covers the surface of the ends of bones, and functions to allow bones to slide against one another smoothly during movement whilst bearing high compressive loads. Its inability to heal naturally, coupled with the increasing demand for a repair strategy, has led researchers to explore regeneration techniques.
In this project, building upon the agarose-based Phase Transfer Cell Culture strategy as developed by Gong et al, a novel biomaterial-free scaffold construct is developed using alginate as an intermediate. Exposure to citrate removes alginate, creating a construct that is made up solely of biological matter (chondrocytes held together by their endogenously secreted extracellular matrix) and hence named “Living Scaffold” (LS).
Extra chondrocytes can be seeded on this construct to increase the therapeutic cell numbers, and an optimized method of reseeding – through using a cell culture insert – is developed. In vitro and in vivo experimental data showed that the LS strategy is a promising one; the potential problems regarding biomaterials, e.g. mismatching of material degradation to tissue regeneration rates, were removed due to the absence of materials within the engineered graft; and the reseeding of cells brings us one step closer to achieving the high therapeutic cell number in implants.
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