Functional Tissue Engineering of Articular Cartilage With Adult Chondrocytes Available to Purchase

The concept of cartilage functional tissue engineering (FTE) has promoted the use of physiologic loading bioreactor systems to cultivate engineered tissues with load-bearing properties [1]. Prior studies have demonstrated that culturing agarose constructs seeded with primary bovine chondrocytes from immature joints, and subjected to dynamic deformation, produced equilibrium compressive properties and proteoglycan content matching the native tissue [2]. In the process of translating these results to an adult canine animal model, it was found that protocols previously successful with immature bovine primary chondrocytes did not produce the same successful outcome when using adult canine primary chondrocytes [3]. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of a modified FTE protocol using adult (canine) chondrocyte-seeded hydrogel constructs and applied dynamic loading.