[Biomechanical properties of tissue-engineered tendons after repairing digital flexor tendons in chickens]

Experiments have been performed to investigate why the biomechanical strength of repaired tendons is lower than that of the normal tendon when the engineered tendons are implanted in vivo to replace the tendon defects. We seeded the primary culture tendon cells derived from Roman chickens' digital flexor tendons on the degradable polyglycolic acid meshes to construct tissue-engineered tendons. The flexor tendon defects (0.5 cm-0.8 cm) excised in second digit bilaterally in 20 Roman chickens, had been repaired with the constructed tissue-engineered tendons. The samples of repaired tendons were collected at 2, 4, 6 and 8 weeks after operation. Tests for scaffold weight, hydroxyproline content, and mechanical strength of the samples were performed. We found that from 2 weeks to 8 weeks afteroperation, the weight of the scaffolds decreased significantly, almost disappearing at 8 weeks; the hydroxyproline content determining the total collagen content increased gradually without significance; mechanically, both energy at break and tensile strength showed a tendency of drastic decrease at first 4 weeks afteroperation and a gradual increase afterwards, but the tensile strength at 8 weeks afteroperation was only 23% of that of the normal tendon. We conclude that the lower biomechanical strength of repaired tendons is owing to the serious mismatch between scaffold degradation and collagen synthesis.