Abstract:

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the tissue engineering properties of the composite scaffold and its performance evaluation for the repair of articular cartilage defects.
METHODS: Using “articular cartilage, biological materials, engineering cartilage, composite materials, composite scaffold” in Chinese and “tissue engineering, articular cartilage, scaffold material” in English as the key words, a computer-based online search of China Academic Journal Full-text database and PubMed database (1993-01/2010-11) was performed. Articles about the composite scaffold-cell compound in the repair of articular cartilage injury, duplicated research or Meta analysis were excluded.
RESULTS: A total of 18 articles were involved in the analysis of results. Composite scaffolds have been widely used in cartilage tissue engineering, it is a biocompatible and biodegradable stent with complementary characteristics, to a composite scaffold of structure and performance optimization can be designed according to certain ratio and combinations. Composite scaffolds are superior to single scaffold, with better biocompatibility and certain toughness, good porosity and mechanical strength. Composite scaffolds include not only the same type of biomaterials, but also different types of biomaterials. Scaffolds can be divided into natural, artificial and compound of natural with artificial scaffolds.
CONCLUSION: The composite scaffolds exhibit complementary properties of biological materials, thus meeting the requirement for an ideal biomaterial scaffold to some extent, but a lot of researches are still at experimental stage, some problems need to be solved, such as the proportion of different composite materials and combination technique.