Alternative Cartilage Tissue Engineering Strategies: Smart Scaffolds & Perfusion Bioreactors
2008 Research Project Grant Round
Approved for Funding by CMRF $74,579.00
For a period of 12 months
Start Date: 01 September 2008
Reseacher 1: Dr Tim Woodfield
University of Otago, Christchurch
Photo: Tim Woodfield and Simon Stroebel working in the
laboratory
Reseacher 2: Dr Simon Stroebel
University of Otago, Christchurch
Reseacher : Associate Professor Ivan Martin
University Hospital Basel, Switzerland
Cartilage is the thin layer of shock absorbing tissue found in joints, allowing smooth joint motion. Once damaged, however, cartilage has almost no ability to heal itself. Damaged cartilage leads to joint pain, arthritis and loss of mobility to thousands of New Zealanders and patients worldwide. Our Regenerative Medicine research group at the University of Otago Christchurch is looking at ways of combining patient's cells, such as chondrocytes or adult stem cells, with biodegradable materials (i.e. that break down naturally in the body) to repair or replace damaged tissues. This strategy is called “Tissue Engineering” and relies on stimulating patient’s cells to take on developmental stages of tissue growth and “make” new repair tissue in the laboratory (in vitro), or when placed back in the body during surgery (in vivo). Such approaches in future may delay the need for, or eventually replace, current total joint replacement procedures and improve long term, pain free joint function to patients with damaged cartilage or arthritis.
There are a number of hurdles that need to be overcome, however, before these Tissue Engineering strategies can be reliably employed in the clinics. Using advanced biodegradable scaffold design and flow perfusion bioreactors, we will study the influence of improved cell to cell interactions on cartilage tissue formation. Our scaffold design and fabrication process allows us to “build” porous templates (or scaffolds) from biodegradable polymers in a layer-by-layer fashion with almost any architecture or shape, based on computer models from CT or MRI images from the patient. These specially designed porous scaffolds then provide a 3-dimensional network into which large numbers of the patient’s cells can be placed (or seeded). Our perfusion bioreactor system (developed in Switzerland by Dr Ströbel and colleagues) uses a special chamber and fluid flow to accurately control the seeding process and provide all the necessary nutrients and growth factors to the cells to allow cartilage formation to occur in the best possible environment. By increasing the quality of engineered cartilage in this way, we aim in future to increase the patient population able to receive cartilage cell therapy treatment, where incidence of cartilage degeneration is greatest.
