Immune rejection is a major concern for any allogeneic or xenogeneic graft. For in vivo investigations of cartilage tissue engineering strategies, small animal models such as the leporine model are commonly employed. Many studies report little to no immune rejection upon allogeneic or xenogeneic implantation of native articular and meniscal cartilages. This study investigated whether bovine and...

INTRODUCTION This work reports observations of T2* relaxation in human knee cartilage explants under ultrashort echo time (UTE) acquisitions in vitro. The objective of this study was to determine the number and distribution of T2* components. We hypothesize that the three major constituents of articular cartilage extracellular matrix (water, collagen, and proteoglycan) contribute to the existen...

The three-dimensional architecture of bovine articular cartilage collagen and its relationship to split lines has been studied with scanning electron microscopy. In the middle and superficial zones, collagen was organised in a layered or leaf-like manner. The orientation was vertical in the intermediate zone, curving to become horizontal and parallel to the articular surface in the superficial ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether interleukin 17 (IL17), derived specifically from T cells, can promote type II collagen release from cartilage. The ability of IL17 to synergise with other proinflammatory mediators to induce collagen release from cartilage, and what effect anti-inflammatory agents had on this process, was also assessed. METHODS IL17 alone, or in combination with IL1, IL6, onco...

We report on a new articular cartilage imaging technique with potential for clinical arthroscopic use, by supplementing the variable-incidence-angle polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography method previously developed by us with a conical beam scan protocol. The technique is validated on bovine tendon by comparing experimental data with simulated data generated using the extended Jon...

The methods of Hascall & Sajdera (1969) were used to compare the proteoglycans of human intervertebral disc with those of bovine nasal cartilage. In contrast with cartilage, most of the hexuronate of disc could be extracted at low shear with water or dilute salt solutions. Extracts of disc with 4M-guanidinium chloride were centrifugated in 0.4M-guanidinium chloride in a CsCl gradient. Analytica...

Part I (Mak et al., 1987, J. Biomechanics 20, 703-714) presented the theoretical solutions for the biphasic indentation of articular cartilage under creep and stress-relaxation conditions. In this study, using the creep solution, we developed an efficient numerical algorithm to compute all three material coefficients of cartilage in situ on the joint surface from the indentation creep experimen...

We have previously shown that capacitively coupled electrical stimulation of either normal bovine articular chondrocytes or osteoarthritic human articular cartilage explants resulted in up-regulation of cartilage matrix gene expression and down-regulation of metalloproteinase gene expression. In addition, collagen and proteoglycan protein levels were also elevated. To determine visually the eff...

OBJECTIVE In vitro models for joint diseases often focus on a single cell type, such as chondrocytes in osteoarthritis (OA) or fibroblast-like synoviocytes (synoviocytes) in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, these joint diseases affect the whole joint and interaction between chondrocytes and synoviocytes may play an important role in disease pathology. The current study was designed to study ...