Tissue engineering: chondrocytes and cartilage

Abstract

Tissue engineering offers new strategies for developing treatments for the repair and regeneration of damaged and diseased tissues. These treatments, using living cells, will exploit new developments in understanding the principles in cell biology that control and direct cell function. Arthritic diseases that affect so many people and have a major impact on the quality of life provide an important target for tissue engineering. Initial approaches are in cartilage repair; in our own programme we are elucidating the signals required by chondrocytes to promote new matrix assembly. These principles will extend to other tissues of the musculoskeletal system, including the repair of bone, ligament and tendon.

Figure 1

The changes in expression of genes in human articular cartilage chondrocytes with increasing passage in culture, detected using RT-PCR. Passage 0 refers to cells that are freshly isolated from the tissue and have not been cultured. GAPDH, glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase; IHH, indian hedgehog; XT, xylosyltransferase.

Figure 2

Real time RT-PCR analysis of RNA from human articular cartilage chondrocytes at different passage in culture. The values shown are expression levels of the indicated genes relative to the expression level found in passage (P) 0 cells that are freshly isolated from the tissue.

Figure 3

Proliferation of passage 1 human articular cartilage cells grown on tissue culture plastic (24-well plate) in different culture media. FCS, foetal calf serum; FGF-2, fibroblast growth factor-2; PTF, medium containing 10% serum, 5 ng/ml FGF-2, 10 ng/ml platelet-derived growth factor-BB and 1 ng/ml transforming growth factor β-1.