Mechanical Characteristics of Tissue Engineered Bone-Ligament-Bone Constructs Following ACL Replacement in Sheep

With approximately 400,000 reported each year, anterior crucial ligament (ACL) injuries are the most common injury in the US. Unfortunately current ACL replacement strategies, which involve using either allografts from cadavers or autografts from patients’ own patellar tendons (PT) or hamstring tendons as a replacement, have several limitations including graft availability, risk of rejection, increased morbidity and, more importantly, unmatched intra-articular biomechanical properties of grafts and ACL. The objective of this study is to use self-assembling, scaffold-less bone-ligament-bone (BLB) engineered tissue constructs as grafts in a sheep ACL repair model to characterize the biomechanical behaviors of native ACL, PT, and tissue engineered ligament and subsequently present a viable option of using tissue engineered ligament graft for ACL repair.