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Mark Ahearne. 1 Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. 2 Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, School of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Yurong Liu. 1 Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. 2 Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, School of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Daniel J. Kelly. 1 Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. 2 Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, School of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Address correspondence to: Daniel J. Kelly, PhD, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland, E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
Traditional cartilage tissue engineering strategies involve the isolation and expansion of cells (either primary chondrocytes, chondroprogenitors, or stem cells) followed by their subsequent culture over several week or months in vitro in a three-dimensional scaffold or hydrogel before the implantation of this construct into a defect site.1 This approach has several limitations that are impeding its widespread clinical adoption, including the high cost and time associated with expanding cells and engineering such a tissue, as well as the requirement for two surgical procedures--one to isolate the cells and the second to implant the engineered tissue. A theoretically more appealing approach would be to combine freshly isolated (FI) stromal cells with a chondroinductive scaffold as a putative one-step surgical procedure for cartilage repair.2,3 FI cells from the infrapatellar fat pad (IFP) of the knee have been shown to be highly chondrogenic with a strong potential for cartilage tissue formation.3 To translate such findings into a single-stage therapy for cartilage repair will most likely require a number of key scientific and technical hurdles to be overcome. These include the development of a relatively simple, fast, and affordable method to isolate a sufficiently large number of chondroprogenitors from the IFP, a scaffold or hydrogel to support these cells in vivo, and potentially a means to control the delivery of stimulatory factors (e.g., one or more chondrogenic growth factors) to the defect site to promote chondrogenesis of the implanted cells.
A number of approaches have been described that can potentially be used to isolate a more homogenous...