Spontaneous hyaline cartilage regeneration can be induced in an osteochondral defect created in the femoral condyle using a novel double-network hydrogel

BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders

Research Article

Takayuki Kurokawa¹  Jian-Ping Gong¹  Shin Onodera²  Nobuto Kitamura²  Kazunobu Arakaki²  Masashi Yokota²  Kazunori Yasuda² 

[1] Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan;Department of Sports Medicine and Joint Surgery, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, Sapporo, Japan;

关键词: Femoral Condyle;    Osteochondral Defect;    Cartilage Regeneration;    Medial Condyle;    Osteochondral Lesion;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2474-12-49

 received in 2010-10-02, accepted in 2011-02-22,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundFunctional repair of articular osteochondral defects remains a major challenge not only in the field of knee surgery but also in tissue regeneration medicine. The purpose is to clarify whether the spontaneous hyaline cartilage regeneration can be induced in a large osteochondral defect created in the femoral condyle by means of implanting a novel double-network (DN) gel at the bottom of the defect.MethodsTwenty-five mature rabbits were used in this study. In the bilateral knees of each animal, we created an osteochondral defect having a diameter of 2.4-mm in the medial condyle. Then, in 21 rabbits, we implanted a DN gel plug into a right knee defect so that a vacant space of 1.5-mm depth (in Group I), 2.5-mm depth (in Group II), or 3.5-mm depth (in Group III) was left. In the left knee, we did not apply any treatment to the defect to obtain the control data. All the rabbits were sacrificed at 4 weeks, and the gross and histological evaluations were performed. The remaining 4 rabbits underwent the same treatment as used in Group II, and real-time PCR analysis was performed at 4 weeks.ResultsThe defect in Group II was filled with a sufficient volume of the hyaline cartilage tissue rich in proteoglycan and type-2 collagen. The Wayne's gross appearance and histology scores showed that Group II was significantly greater than Group I, III, and Control (p < 0.012). The relative expression level of type-2 collagen, aggrecan, and SOX9 mRNAs was significantly greater in Group II than in the control group (p < 0.023).ConclusionsThis study demonstrated that spontaneous hyaline cartilage regeneration can be induced in vivo in an osteochondral defect created in the femoral condyle by means of implanting the DN gel plug at the bottom of the defect so that an approximately 2-mm deep vacant space was intentionally left in the defect. This fact has prompted us to propose an innovative strategy without cell culture to repair osteochondral lesions in the femoral condyle.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Yokota et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.