Scaffolds for Articular Joint Tissue Engineering

Adult articular cartilage has a limited capacity to repair damaged tissue resulting from injury or disease. Different therapeutic approximations to restore the tissue function like ACI or mosaicplasty have been developed but are not completely successful. The use of three-dimensional scaffolds as a support to neotissue development can be an attractive alternative approach. In these work, different material and production methods are evaluated in order to select a suitable candidate to knee joint repair. Further aspects concerning scaffold seeding, degradation rates and cell genetic expression profiles are also studied.