Biblioteca Digital

Articular cartilage is the connective tissue that lines the ends of long bones in diarthrodial joints, providing a low-friction load-bearing surface that can withstand a lifetime of loading cycles under normal conditions. Despite these unique and advantageous properties, the tissue possesses a limited capacity for self-repair due to its lack of vasculature and innervation. Total joint replacement is a well-established treatment for degenerative joint disease; however, the materials used in these procedures have a limited lifespan in vivo and will likely fail over time, requiring additional - and increasingly complicated - revision surgeries. For younger or more active patients, this risk is unacceptable. Unfortunately, alternative surgical options are not currently available, leaving pain management as the only viable treatment. In seeking to discover a new therapeutic strategy, the goal of this dissertation was to develop a functional tissue-engineered cartilage construct that may be used to resurface an entire diseased or damaged joint.

A three-dimensional (3-D) woven textile structure, produced on a custom-built miniature weaving loom, was utilized as the basis for producing novel composite scaffolds and cartilage tissue constructs that exhibited initial properties similar to those of native articular cartilage. Using polyglycolic acid (PGA) fibers combined with chondrocyte-loaded agarose or fibrin hydrogels...

Articular cartilage is a connective tissue that lines the surfaces of diarthrodial joints; and functions to support and distribute loads as wells as facilitate smooth joint articulation. Unfortunately, cartilage possesses a limited capacity to self-repair. Once damaged, cartilage continues to degenerate until widespread cartilage loss results in the debilitating and painful disease of osteoarthritis. Current treatment options are limited to palliative interventions that seek to mitigate pain, and fail to recapitulate the native function. Cartilage tissue engineering offers a novel treatment option for the repair of focal defects as well as the complete resurfacing of osteoarthritic joints. Tissue engineering combines cells, growth factors, and biomaterials in order to synthesize new cartilage tissue that recapitulates the native structure, mechanical properties, and function of the native tissue. In this endeavor, there has been a growing interest in the use of scaffolds derived from the native extracellular matrix of cartilage. These cartilage-derived matrix (CDM) scaffolds have been show to recapitulate the native epitopes for cell-matrix interactions as well as provide entrapped growth factors; and have been shown to stimulate chondrogenic differentiation of a variety of cell types. Despite the potent chondroinductive properties of CDM scaffolds...