Abstract
In the last two decades, the achievements of tissue engineering provided the surgeons with a pool of new and promising options for the treatment of cartilage defects. Cell-based regenerative techniques, also in combination with various biomaterials, were proposed to improve the tissue quality and the clinical outcomes. Despite several investigations that showed satisfactory clinical results in the long term, the need for two surgical procedures and the related costs limited their use. Thus, the possibility to avoid any cell augmentation by implanting biomaterials able to exploit the patient self-regenerative potential in situ was explored. Since then, several matrices were successfully introduced in the clinical use, and their intrinsic ability to promote tissue regeneration produced positive results in terms of clinical improvement. Also, some biomaterials were combined to reproduce the requirements of both bone and cartilage, in order to address osteochondral defects. This narrative review aims at resuming the state of the art concerning the clinical use of acellular scaffolds for the treatment of cartilage conditions.
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Romandini, I., Perdisa, F., Filardo, G., Kon, E. (2018). Cell-Free Scaffolds for the Treatment of Chondral and Osteochondral Lesions. In: Farr, J., Gomoll, A. (eds) Cartilage Restoration. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77152-6_24
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