| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 化學工程學系 === 100 === The U.S. costs 128 million per year due to arthritis disease currently. With the aging and obesity, osteoarthritis patients have increased. Cartilage lacks blood vessels and lymphatic tissue, its ability to repair itself doesn’t like other tissue. According to the concept of tissue engineering, the cells were transplanted to the suitable scaffolds, to replace the damaged parts of the original by regenerative tissue. In recent year, hydrogels have been used as scaffolds for cartilage tissue regeneration, partly for their high water content that can enhance nutrients transport. Cartilage tissue regeneration was confronted with limited availability of suitable autologous chondrocytes, since in vitro expansion in 2-D culture of these cells leads to de-differentiation, and the loss of their ability to secrete cartilage extracellular matrices such as collagen type II and proteoglycan. The cell source of cartilage tissue engineering is chondrocytes and Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). MSCs cultured alone have low induced efficiency and potential risk of tumor formation, resulting in restriction on clinical use. This study is trying to induce MSCs chondrogenicly by co-culture with chondrocytes, which stimulate MSCs differentiation.
On the scaffold aspect, this study synthesized different molar ratio of PEG/PCL triblock copolymer, using different lengths of hydrophobic chains (PCL) block with the hydrophilic material (PEG) at both end. Cell compatibility of different hydrophobic/ hydrophilic ratio hydrogels was examined by analyzing the synthesis of extracellular matrix (such as GAG and collagen). The results showed that the secretion of extracellular matrix increase with time and have different synthesis ability with different hydrogels. The suitable materials were selected to culture with different ratio of chondrocytes and MSCs. These results suggested that the PECL12 hydrogels are suitable to encapsulate MSCs and chondrocytes. During co-culture experiment, different MSCs and chondrocytes ratio resulted in different ECM accumulation after 4 week. Compared with gene expression and histological analysis can found that S4C1 has better results than other co-culture ratio. Furthermore, using PECL12 hydrogels encapsulated S4C1 can found better regeneration efficiency in vivo.
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