RESEARCH ARTICLE
Improving In Vitro Generated Cartilage-Carrier-Constructs by Optimizing Growth Factor Combination
Katharina Wiegandt, Christiane Goepfert*, Ralf Pörtner
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2007Volume: 1
First Page: 85
Last Page: 90
Publisher ID: TOBEJ-1-85
DOI: 10.2174/1874120700701010085
Article History:
Received Date: 2/10/2007Revision Received Date: 29/11/2007
Acceptance Date: 30/11/2007
Electronic publication date: 13/12/2007
Collection year: 2007
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/) which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The presented study is focused on the generation of osteochondral implants for cartilage repair, which consist of bone substitutes covered with in vitro engineered cartilage. Re-differentiation of expanded porcine cells was performed in alginate gel followed by cartilage formation in high-density cell cultures. In this work, different combinations of growth factors for the stimulation of re-differentiation and cartilage formation have been tested to improve the quality of osteochondral implants. It has been demonstrated that supplementation of the medium with growth factors has significant effects on the properties of the matrix. The addition of the growth factors IGF-I (100 ng/mL) and TGF-β1 (10 ng/mL) during the alginate culture and the absence of any growth factors during the high-density cell culture led to significantly higher GAG to DNA ratios and Young’s Moduli of the constructs compared to other combinations. The histological sections showed homogenous tissue and intensive staining for collagen type II.