UNLABELLED Orthopedic interface tissue engineering aims to mimic the structure and function of soft-to-hard tissue junctions, particularly bone-ligament, bone-tendon, and bone-cartilage interfaces. A range of engineering approaches has been proposed to mimic the gradient architecture, physical properties and chemical characteristics of interface tissues using conventional polymeric biomaterials...

Introduction Articular cartilage has a poor intrinsic capacity for repair. Bone marrow (BM) derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are an attractive cell type for use in cartilage tissue engineering due to their ease of expansion. A central challenge in tissue engineering is preventing core degradation. This challenge will be amplified if MSCs are to be used in the repair of large bone defects v...

Tissue engineering (TE) has become an alternative for auricular reconstruction based on the combination of cells, molecular signals and biomaterials. Scaffolds are biomaterials that provide structural support for cell attachment and subsequent tissue development. Ideally, a scaffold should have characteristics such as biocompatibility and bioactivity to adequate support cell functions. Our purp...

©2004 British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery doi:10.1302/0301-620X.86B8. 15609 $2.00 J Bone Joint Surg [Br] 2004;86-B:1093-9. Each year, more than one million procedures to treat defects of articular cartilage are performed in the knee alone.1 While removal of loose bodies and the chondroplastic procedures of debridement and shaving account for approximately half of these, the rema...

It is well accepted that natural tissue regeneration is unlikely to occur if the cells are not supplied with an extracellular matrix (ECM) substitute. With this goal, several different methodologies have been used to produce a variety of 3D scaffolds as artificial ECM substitutes suitable for bone and cartilage tissue engineering. Furthermore, osteochondral tissue engineering presents new chall...

The imperfections of scaffold materials have hindered the clinical application of cartilage tissue engineering. The recently developed cell-sheet technique is adopted to engineer tissues without scaffold materials, thus is considered being potentially able to overcome the problems concerning the scaffold imperfections. This study constructed monolayer and bilayer chondrocyte cell sheets and har...

Safety is the foremost issue in all human cell therapies, but human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) currently lack a useful safety indicator. Studies in chimeric mice have demonstrated that certain lines of iPSCs are tumorigenic; however a similar screen has not been developed for human iPSCs. Here, we show that in vitro cartilage tissue engineering is an excellent tool for screening hum...

Umbilical cord Wharton's jelly-derived mesenchymal stem cell (WJMSC) is a new-found mesenchymal stem cell in recent years with multiple lineage potential. Due to its abundant resources, no damage procurement, and lower immunogenicity than other adult MSCs, WJMSC promises to be a good xenogenous cell candidate for tissue engineering. This in vivo pilot study explored the use of human umbilical c...