[Development of cartilage extracellular matrix in cartilage tissue engineering]

Cartilage tissue engineering, an effective way to repair cartilage defects, requires an ideal scaffold to promote the regeneration performance of stem cells. Cartilage extracellular matrix (CECM) can imitate the living environment of cartilage cells to the greatest extent. CECM not only exhibits good biocompatibility with chondrocytes and stem cells, which can meet the basic requirements of scaffolds, but also promotes chondrocytes to secrete matrix and induce stem cells to differentiate into chondrocytes; as such, this matrix is a better scaffold and has more advantages than existing ones. The promotion and induction effects could be related to various cartilage-related proteins inside. However, the practical application of this technique is hindered by problems, such as poor mechanical properties and insufficient cell penetration of CECM. Association with other materials can compensate for these inadequacies to a certain degree, and finding a combination mode with optimized performance is the application trend of CECM. This review focuses on research of CECM materials in cartilage tissue engineering.