Scaffold-free approaches for the fabrication of engineered articular cartilage tissue

Abstract

Abstract Tissue engineered cartilaginous constructs have meet great advances in the past decades as a treatment for osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease affecting people all over the world as the population ages. Scaffold-free tissue engineered constructs are designed and developed in recent years with only cells and cell-derived matrix involved. Scaffold-free tissue constructs do not require cell adherence on exogenous materials and are superior to scaffold-based constructs in (a) relying on only cells to produce matrix, (b) not interfering cell–cell signaling, cell migration or small molecules diffusion after implantation and (c) introducing no exogenous impurities. In this review, three main scaffold-free methodologies for cartilage tissue engineering, the cell sheet technology, the phase transfer cell culture-living hyaline cartilage graft system and the cell aggregate-based (bottom-up) methods, were reviewed, covering mold fabrication, decellularization and 3D bioprinting. The recent advances, medical applications, superiority and drawbacks were elaborated in detail.