Chondrocytes and Polymer Fleeces

Abstract

Different surgical techniques have been introduced as treatment options for chondral and osteochondral defects [31]. Apart from debridement or chondroplasty, opening of the marrow cavity is used to induce bleeding and to initiate the formation of fibrocartilaginous scar tissue. More recent techniques have tried to implement some type of biological surface repair. These treatments include the transplantation of chondrogenic materials such as periosteum [14], or perichondrium [3], as well as chondrocyte transplantation as a suspension [2], or the transplantation of tissue-engineered cartilage constructs [1, 6, 8–10, 13, [16, 18, 27, 29, 30]. Promising results have been reported and many investigators have focused their efforts on the creation of a more natural hyaline cartilage using isolated chondrocytes or mesenchymal stem cells on different types of carrier materials. Only a small piece of original cartilage must be sacrificed in order to propagate the number of cells in vitro, and to create a new cartilaginous matrix for implantation into a large defect. Maturation of the tissue in vitro is appealing because cartilage-specific matrix can be remodeled by the immobilized cultured cells before transplantation (Fig. 16.1). Various materials have been used in different experimental animals but a comparison of different carrier matrices cultured with chondrocytes in the same experimental set-up has not been carried out so far. We therefore investigated 3 resorbable matrices in an osteochondral defect model in the rabbit knee. The investigated matrices have previously been found suitable for the creation of tissue-engineered cartilage in vitro [21–23].

This study was funded in part by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Wi 494/14-1) and by the Deutsche Arthrose Hilfe.