Recent technological advancements related to articular cartilage regeneration

Some treatments for full thickness defects of the articular cartilage, such as the transplantation of cultured chondrocytes have already been performed. However, in order to overcome osteoarthritis, we must further study the partial thickness defects of articular cartilage. It is much more difficult to repair a partial thickness defect because few repair cells can address such injured sites. We herein show that bioengineered and layered chondrocyte sheets using temperature-responsive culture dishes may be a potentially useful treatment for the repair of partial thickness defects. We also show that a chondrocyte-plate using a rotational culture system without the use of a scaffold may also be useful as a core cartilage of an articular cartilageous defect. We evaluated the properties of these sheets and plates using histological findings, scanning electrical microscopy, and photoacoustic measurement methods, which we developed to evaluate the biomechanical properties of tissue-engineered cartilage. In conclusion, the layered chondrocyte sheets and chondrocyte-plates were able to maintain the cartilageous phenotype, thus suggesting that they could be a new and potentially effective therapeutic product when attached to the sites of cartilage defects.