Application of artificial biomaterials for the treatment of tendon injury / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinical application of tissue engineering for treating tendon injury.METHODS: A computer-based online search was conducted in Medline and China Academic Journals Database with the key words of "Biological material, Sinew mechanism heals" in both English and Chinese from 1974 to 2009. Relevant books were hand-retrieved.RESULTS: Scholars at home and abroad tried to investigate how to regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, and matrix synthesis by endogenous and exogenous growth factors so as to promote tendon repairing, relieve tendon adhesion, and decrease attenuation of biomechanical intensity. Tendon detect was mainly treated by autologous tendon transplantation,allogeneic tendon transplantation, artificial tendon transplantation, and tissue-engineered tendon transplantation. All those methods had both advantages and disadvantages. However, artificial biomaterial tendon has attracted much attention and it has been used for clinical application. Of course, there are still more problems to be solved, for example, source of tissue-engineered seed cells, immunological reaction of allogeneic tendon cells, specific mechanical intension, preparation and selection of degradable scaffold materials, correlation between cell and scaffold materials, and correlation between cell-material compound and peripheral tissues. With the development of tendon repairing and healing, single drug which was used to prevent tendon adhesion has developed into drug-barrier compound. Additionally, with the development of Chinese herb and molecular biological products, they not only inhibited exogenous healing, but also promote endogenous healing. Meanwhile, simple surgery has also developed into combined therapy.CONCLUSION: Although biomaterials for tendon repairing have achieved breakthrough in some respects, the results need also to be further studied.