An Off-the-Shelf Tissue Engineered Cartilage Composed of Optimally Sized Pellets of Cartilage Progenitor/Stem Cells

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Articular cartilage focal lesion remains an intractable challenge in sports medicine and autologous chondrocytes implantation (ACI) is one of the most commonly-utilized treatment modality for this ailment. However, the current ACI technique requires two surgical steps which increases patients’ morbidity and incur additional medical costs. In the present study, we developed a one-step cryopreserved off-the-shelf ACI tissue engineered (TE) cartilage by seeding pellets of spheroidal cartilage stem/progenitor cells (CSPCs) on a silk scaffold. The pellets were developed through a hanging-drop method and the incubation time of 1 day could efficiently produce spheroidal pellets without any adverse influence on the cell activity. The pellet size was also optimized. Under chondrogenic induction, pellets consisting of 40 thousand CSPCs were found to exhibit the most abundant cartilage matrix deposition and the highest mRNA expression levels of SOX9, aggrecan and COL2A1, as compared to pellets consisting of 10 thousand, 100 thousand or 200 thousand CSPCs. Scaffolds seeded with CSPCs pellets containing 40 thousand cells could be preserved in liquid nitrogen with the viability, migration and chondrogenic ability remaining unaffected for as long as three months. When implanted in a rat trochlear cartilage defect model for 3 months, the ready-to-use cryopreserved TE cartilage yielded fully cartilage reconstruction, which was comparable with the uncryopreserved control. Hence, our study provided preliminary data that our off-the-shell TE cartilage with optimally-sized CSPCs pellets seeded within silk scaffolds exhibited strong cartilage repair capacity, which provided a convenient and promising one-step surgical approach to ACI.
Funding Information
  • Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur F?rderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (EG 04-032014)
  • Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2017YFA0104900, 2017YFA0104901, 2017YFA0104902)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271041, 31570987, 81125014, 81201396, 81271970, 81330041, 81371996, 81401781, 81522029, 81572115, 81572157, 81572173, 81871793, 81874019, EG 04-032014, J1103603)
  • Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LD19H060001)

This publication has 50 references indexed in Scilit: