CARTILAGE TISSUE ENGINEERING

Tissue engineering is a new approach for articular cartilage repair. The aim of the present article was to review the current status of cartilage tissue engineering researches. The scaffold materials used for cartilage tissue engineering, the in vitro, in vivo studies and the clinical trials were all reviewed. Our researches about in vitro cartilage tissue engineering with new type bioactive scaffold and preliminary animal studies results will also be described. The scaffold was tricopolymer made from gelatin, hyaluronan and chondroitin. Chondrocytes seeded in tricopolymer showed in vitro engineered cartilage formation. The engineered cartilage constructs were implanted into knee joints of miniature pigs for animal study.