Scaffold-free tissue engineering for injured joint surface restoration.
review · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29330730.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1186/s40634-017-0118-0 and PMC identifier 5768574.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Articular cartilage does not heal spontaneously due to its limited healing capacity, and thus effective treatments for cartilage injuries has remained challenging. Since the first report by Brittberg et al. in 1994, autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI) has been introduced into the clinic. Recently, as an alternative for chondrocyte-based therapy, mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based therapy has received considerable research attention because of the relative ease in handling for tissue harvest, and subsequent cell expansion and differentiation. In this review, we discuss the latest developments regarding stem cell-based therapies for cartilage repair, with special focus on recent scaffold-free approaches.