Tribological Stimulation of Agarose/Chondrocyte Constructs for Tissue Engineering Applications

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About 4 million Canadians have osteoarthritic damage to the articular cartilage surfaces of one or more of their joints. For some, this age-related disease progresses slowly without much restriction to their activities but in others it rapidly reaches an end-stage condition where mobility is severely impaired and the joint itself is totally destroyed. The only current treatment is to replace the joint with an inert, somewhat less functional, implant. Each year, about 80,000 joints are replaced in Canada. Tissue engineering research is trying to develop repair/regeneration procedures for damage joint surfaces. It may eventually be possible to delay or even prevent osteoarthritis in a significant number of patients. One approach is to grow articular cartilage constructs and surgically patch the damaged joint surfaces in the early stages of the disease. A major problem with this approach is the difficulty in growing constructs that have the strength and lubrication protection found in healthy articular cartilage. As a result, animal experiments have shown that these constructs, especially if large, have increasing difficulty in surviving in the joint for the long term. The proposed research program addresses this problem with a hydromechanical stimulator device that acts on the construct surface while it is growing to impose compression, shear, friction and nutrient-rich fluid flow. These types of stimulation have each been shown to be effective in improving construct strength and lubrication protection. This stimulator device has been designed, built and used in pilot studies to stimulate cartilage cells in an agarose polymer construct that is mechanically similar to articular cartilage. The proposed research program will perform extensive testing in order to understand and optimize the stimulation performance. Then, the more complicated problem of using the stimulation to help grow articular cartilage constructs will be studied. If successful, this research will contribute to a highly effective and more natural approach to treating osteoarthritis.