Adult articular cartilage has a poor healing capacity, which has lead to intense research toward development of cell-based therapies for cartilage repair. The destruction of articular cartilage results in osteoarthritis (OA), which affects about 27 million Americans. In order to create functional tissue, it is essential to mimic the native environment by optimizing expansion protocols. Cell passaging and priming with chemical or physical factors are often necessary steps in cell-based strategies for regenerative medicine [1]. The ability to identify biomarkers that can act as predictors of cells with a high capacity to form functional engineered cartilage will permit optimization of protocols for cartilage tissue engineering using different cell sources. Recent investigations have shown that chondrocytes and synovium-derived stem cells (SDSCs) are promising cell sources for cartilage repair [2,3]. The analysis of gene expression and comparative proteomics, which defines the differences in expression of proteins among different biological states, provides a potentially powerful tool in this effort [4]. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of growth factor priming in 2D canine chondrocytes and SDSCs cultures by identifying differentially regulated biomarkers, which can correlate to functional tissue elaboration in 3D.
Recent Advances in Cartilage Tissue Engineering: From the Choice of Cell Sources to the Use of Bioreactors.
