Application of Injectable Cryogel Scaffolds with Shape-Memory Properties in Cartilage Engineering

Due to the difficulty of cartilage regeneration, repair of cartilage defects is an important tissue in clinical application of tissue engineering. Although injectable scaffold is a preferred way for cell delivery considering the advantages offered by minimum invasive surgery, it is difficulty to deliver cells by injection of cell-seeded scaffolds to the defect site. This proposal will address this problem by designing injectable shape-memory scaffold for repair of knee joint cartilage and invertebrate disk. We will use components in the extracellular matrix of cartilage (gelatin and hyaluronic acid) to be co-crosslinked with chondrogenic small molecular drug (glucosamine) to prepare cryogel beads with injectable and memory-shape properties. Experimental design will be carried out to investigate the interaction of parameters during scaffold preparation. By carefully controlling those parameters, we will show the capability to fabricate cryogel beads with uniform but different diameters to be applied to different defect areas with different defect sizes. We will prepare and characterize the cryogel beads and carry out static culture of bone marrow stem cells for cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation. Dynamic culture by cyclic compression will be followed by culture the cell/scaffold constructs in a perfusion bioreactor with different compression ratio and compression time. Finally, we will use rabbit total knee joint defect and rat caudal invertebrate dusk defect repair models to prove the efficacy of cartilage regeneration. In a clinical setting, we hope to use minimum invasive surgery to deliver the stem cells-seeded cryogel scaffold through a needle to the defect site. By taking advantage of the compressible and total recoverable volume properties of the scaffolds, we expect to fill the defect completely with the cell/scaffold construct and seamlessly regenerate cartilage tissue after cell proliferation and differentiation.

Project ID:PC10607-0355
External Project ID:MOST106-2314-B182-013-MY2