Tissue engineering technology for repair of meniscus injury：from basic to clinic / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The use of tissue engineering technology to build a functional meniscus is a new idea for repair of meniscus injury. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the research progress of seed cells and scaffold materials in tissue-engineered meniscus repair. METHODS: A computer-based search of CNKI and PubMed was performed for articles related to tissue-engineered meniscus repair published from 1996 to 2015. The keywords were meniscal repair, meniscal injury, tissue engineering, tissue-engineered meniscus, biomaterials, stem cells in Chinese and English, respectively. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Tissue-engineered meniscus reconstruction is a more viable method for repair of meniscus injury. Mesenchymal stem cells are pluripotent cells that are ideal seed cells for tissue-engineered meniscus reconstruction. Scaffolds are one of important factors for meniscus repair, and natural meniscal scaffolds play an important role. Selection and development of scaffold materials for meniscus tissue engineering have experienced a rapid development period from a single material to composite materials. Composite materials make up a lot of shortcomings and deficiencies that a single material has, and open up new ideas for developing new materials. Meniscal tissues with geometric shapes can be constructed using tissue engineering technology. However, the long-term observation of the biological properties of meniscal tissues is necessary, and from basic to clinic, there is still a lack of reliable data to prove the effect of tissue engineering technology in the meniscus repair.