Cellular therapy in bone-tendon interface regeneration

Gene therapy for bone regeneration.

Nonunions and delayed unions are among the more challenging clinical and surgical entities an orthopaedic surgeon must manage. Effective strategies that address these complex problems are in need and gene therapy represents a potential therapeutic option. Among the many properties that bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) possess, their potent osteoinductive effects make them attractive growth fa...

Joints: Regeneration of Bone, Cartilage, Meniscus, Ligament, and Tendon

Co-cultured tissue-specific scaffolds for tendon/bone interface engineering

The tendon/ligament-to-bone interface has a complex organization to enable transfer of forces through the tendon/ligament to the bone. The purpose of this study is to create a co-culture environment enabling a tissue-specific tendon region and tissue-specific bone region on a degradable scaffold, using NIH 3T3 fibroblast-deposited extracellular matrix and MC 3T3 osteoblast-deposited extracellul...

Biomarkers for tissue engineering of the tendon-bone interface

The tendon-bone interface (enthesis) is a highly sophisticated biomaterial junction that allows stress transfer between mechanically dissimilar materials. The enthesis encounters very high mechanical demands and the regenerative capacity is very low resulting in high rupture recurrence rates after surgery. Tissue engineering offers the potential to recover the functional integrity of entheses. ...

Gene therapy approaches for bone regeneration.

Gene therapy represents a promising approach for delivering regenerative molecules to specific tissues including bone. Several laboratories have shown that virus-based BMP expression vectors can stimulate osteoblast differentiation and bone formation in vivo. Both in vivo and ex vivo transduction of cells can induce bone formation at ectopic and orthotopic sites. Adenovirus and direct DNA deliv...