Cartilage Repair via Nanoscale Scaffolds & Stem Cells

In that joint pain affects the quality of life of millions of people, current surgical procedures merely offer short-term solutions. Jennifer Elisseeff, from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Maryland, USA), and colleagues have engineered a temporary template that mimics the cartilage cell’s natural environment. The researchers created a nanofiber-based network using a process called electrospinning, which entails shooting a polymer stream onto a charged platform, and added chondroitin sulfate to serve as a growth trigger. After characterizing the fibers, they made a number of different scaffolds from either spun polymer or spun polymer plus chondroitin. They then used goat bone marrow-derived stem cells (a widely used model) and seeded them in various scaffolds to see how stem cells responded to the material. The team then watched the cells grow and found that compared to cells growing without scaffold, these cells developed into more voluminous, cartilage-like tissue. The resulting scaffold mimics the cartilage cell environment and generates new cartilage tissue.  The environment is a 3-dimensional mix of protein fibers and gel that provides support to connective tissue throughout the body, as well as physical and biological cues for cells to grow and differentiate.