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Abstract
Once damaged, articular cartilage has very little capacity for spontaneous healing
because of the avascular nature of the tissue. Although many repair techniques have
been proposed over the past four decades, none has sucessfully regenerated long-lasting
hyaline cartilage tissue to replace damaged cartilage. Tissue engineering approaches,
such as transplantation of isolated chondrocytes, have recently demonstrated tremendous
clinical potential for regeneration of hyaline-like cartilage tissue and treatment
of chondral lesions. As such a new approach emerges, new important questions arise.
One of such questions is: what kinds of biomaterials can be used with chondrocytes
to tissue-engineer articular cartilage? The success of chondrocyte transplantation
and/or the quality of neocartilage formation strongly depend on the specific cell-carrier
material. The present article reviews some of those biomaterials, which have been
suggested to promote chondrogenesis and to have potentials for tissue engineering
of articular cartilage. A new biomaterial, a chitosan-based polysaccharide hydrogel,
is also introduced and discussed in terms of the biocompatibility with chondrocytes.