Progress in Cartilage Engineering Over the Past Four Years

Here I'll point you to a recent open access review paper on the use of adult stem cells in the production of cartilage tissue. Cartilage regenerates poorly, and wear and tear in the load-bearing cartilage of joints over the course of aging is the cause of considerable disability and suffering. Any cartilage injuries accumulated along the way only make things worse. Cartilage is a highly structured tissue, in which the precise arrangement of cells and extracellular matrix molecules provides the mechanical properties necessary to its function. This was perhaps less appreciated than it should have been, at least until researchers started trying in earnest to grow cartilage from stem cells. The complex molecular structure of cartilage has made it a real challenge to engineer this tissue, and only very recently have researchers made inroads into getting the structure right, such as through the mesenchymal condensation technique. Even so production of all of the varied types of cartilage tissue - elastic, hyaline, and fibrocartilage - is yet to be reliably accomplished. It is worth noting that, all this aside, cartilage is one of the "easy" tissues to engineer, being comparatively uniform and lacking in blood vessel networks. Forming and integrating blood vessels is one of the big challenges in building tissues of any significant size, and there is still no good, robust solution to that problem. Until researchers can manage cartilage, muscle, skin, and the like, it is premature to...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs