Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Bone cartilage scaffold is used for loading cells, as a carrier of cell adhesion, growth, proliferation, differentiation.
OBJECTIVE: To summarize the research progress of scaffold materials for sports articular cartilage defects and their biocompatibility as biological substitute materials.
METHODS: Using “articular cartilage, biological materials, engineering cartilage, scaffolds, biocompatibility” as the Chinese key words and “tissue engineering, articular cartilage, scaffold material” as the English key words, a computer retrieval of VIP database and PubMed database from January 1993 to November 2010 was performed. Articles about the repair of articular cartilage damage, biological materials, scaffold materials, and biocompatibility were included. 20 articles focus on the biocompatibility of biomaterials for repairing sports articular cartilage defects.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Due to cell recognition signal, natural cartilage scaffolds have good biocompatibility, high cell adhesion rate, but poor mechanical properties. Some synthetic materials is poor in the biocompatibility, hydrophilicity and cell adhesion, synthetic polymers have good biocompatibility. Compound scaffolds utilize the advantages of different biological materials to restrain their limitations, thus becoming an ideal scaffold; the mixing ratio and mixture technology require further studies. There is no ideal scaffold to satisfy tissue engineering requirements, material properties will continue to increase through improvements of material preparation or composite of several different materials.