Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Meniscus injury is a common sports injury of the knee joint, often accompanied by relevant cartilage damage, the reason is the environment disorders within the knee joint.
OBJECTIVE: To seek reasonable meniscus alternatives by evaluating performance of biological scaffold material in tissue-engineered meniscus construction.
METHODS: Databases of VIP and PubMed were searched by computer using key words of “tissue engineering, the meniscus repair, biological material scaffold, and athletic meniscal injury” from January 1994 to December 2009. Totally 30 papers related to exercise-induced meniscus injury and application of tissue-engineered meniscus were included. The features of meniscus, sources of seed cells for tissue-engineered meniscus, biocompatibility and degradability of tissue-engineered meniscus, as well as the role of cytokine in tissue-engineered meniscus construction were evaluated.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Compared with the traditional meniscus repair, tissue-engineered meniscus is characterized by no antigenicity, not restricted sources, pre-designed plastic and high vitality. However, there are still many problems to be solved in the tissue-engineered meniscus field, such as, how to construct meniscus tissue by simulating in vivo environment, how to improve the application of scaffold materials, and how to prepare a scaffold that has similar mechanical properties of normal human meniscus tissues.