[Progress of research in osteoarthritis. Tissue engineering therapy for osteoarthritis]

To repair articular cartilage defects, transplantation of various tissue or cells have been investigated. In 1994, autologous chondrocyte implantation was introduced by Brittberg et al. and the technology has been widely applied to repair cartilage defects caused by trauma. However, it is hard to be applied for articular cartilage defects in osteoarthritic patients. Recently, several researchers are trying to treat osteoarthritis using tissue-engineering approaches on the basis of stem cells and scaffold. In this paper, we introduce the trend of the approaches for cartilage defects and refer to the possibility for the treatments of osteoarthritic patients.