BACKGROUND: As the articular cartilage almost has no self-repair capacity, and in clinic, the repair on it mainly depends on the autologous or allogenic cartilage transplantation, perichondrium or periosteal transplantation and the chondrocytes transplantation. The limitation of autologous cartilage source and the chronic immune rejection of allograft cartilage may eventually lead to the poor prognosis. The cartilage repaired by perichondrium or periosteum transplantation is easy to degenerate which may lead to a poor repair result.
OBJECTIVE: To review the research progress of tissue engineered chondrocytes , bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells and the co-culture of them on the repair of allogeneic cartilage defects.
METHODS: A computer-based search on the PubMed database and CNKI database from January 1994 to January 2012 was performed for the articles on tissue engineered chondrocytes and bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells for the repair of allograft articular cartilage defects. The English key words were “cartilage defect, allograft, chondrocyte, mesenchymal stem cells，bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells” and the Chinese key words were “cartilage defect, allograft, chondrocyte, bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells”. The repetitive articles and the articles not in English or Chinese were eliminated, and finally, a total of 35 articles were included to review.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: With the continuous improvement of in vitro cell culture methods, chondrocytes can be isolated from the tough cartilage, and a large number of high-purity chondrocytes and new chondrocytes can be obtained. Due to the low proliferative capacity of the chondrocytes, subculture may easily lead to aging and dedifferentiation; however, the content of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells is low in adult bone marrow, with the increasing of the passages number, the chondrogenic potential is significantly decreased. When the bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells co-cultured with chondrocytes, they can promote the proliferation and differentiation of each other. And as the seed cells, bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells can reduce the proliferation and passage number of chondrocytes and save the content of chondrocytes, and it can effectively repair the articular cartilage defects when composited with the tissue engineering scaffold.