Research Progress of Tissue-Engineered Cartilage in Repairing Cartilage Defects

Abstract

Due to the unsatisfactory outcome of current clinical treatment, tissue engineering technology has become a promising approach for the treatment of cartilage defects. Typical cartilage tissue engineering uses seed cells that have been expanded in vitro to implant into various biomaterial scaffolds that are biocompatible and are gradually degraded and absorbed in the body, with or without physical/chemical factors mimicking the cartilage microenvironment, to regenerate cartilage tissue with similar biochemical and biomechanical properties to natural cartilage tissue. Therefore, we summarise the three aspects of seed cells, biological scaffolds, and factors/signals.