Cartilage
“Injuries to soft tissue, such as cartilage, skin, muscle, bone, tendon and ligament, where the tissue has been injured or traumatized frequently require surgical intervention to repair the damage and facilitate healing. Such surgical repairs can include suturing or otherwise repairing the damaged tissue with known medical devices, augmenting the damaged tissue with other tissue, using an implant, a graft or any combination of these techniques.”
“There is a continuing need in this art for novel surgical techniques for the surgical treatment of damaged tissue (e.g., cartilage, meniscal cartilage, ligaments, tendons and skin) that can effect a more reliable repair of tissue and can facilitate the healing of damaged tissue. Various surgical implants are known and have been used in surgical procedures to help achieve these benefits. For example, it is known to use various devices and techniques for creating implants having isolated cells loaded onto a delivery vehicle. Such cell-seeded implants are used in an in vitro method of making and/or repairing cartilage by growing cartilaginous structures that consist of chondrocytes seeded onto biodegradable, biocompatible fibrous polymeric matrices. Such methods require the initial isolation of chondrocytes from cartilaginous tissue prior to the chondrocytes being seeded onto the polymeric matrices. Other techniques for repairing damaged tissue employ implants having stem or progenitor cells that are used to produce the desired tissue. For example, it is known to use stem or progenitor cells, such as the cells within fatty tissue, muscle, or bone marrow, to regenerate bone and/or cartilage in a patient. The stem cells are removed from the patient and placed in an environment favorable to cartilage formation, thereby inducing the fatty tissue cells to proliferate and to create a different type of cell, such as for example, cartilage cells.”
Recent US Patents
11/2/2010
7,824,701
Biocompatible scaffold for ligament or tendon repair
Binette et al of Ethicon, New Jersey, developed a biocompatible ligament repair implant or scaffold device for use in repairing a variety of ligament tissue injuries. The repair procedures may be conducted with ligament repair implants that contain a biological component that assists in healing or tissue repair. The biocompatible ligament repair implants include a biocompatible scaffold and particles of viable tissue derived from ligament tissue or tendon tissue, such that the tissue and the scaffold become associated. The particles of living tissue contain one or more viable cells that can migrate from the tissue and populate the scaffold. (RDC 2/23/2011)
Recent Journal Articles
2/4/2011
A hybrid scaffold of poly(lactide-co-glycolide) sponge filled with fibrin gel for cartilage tissue engineering
(233-240) Chinese Journal of Polymer Science 29, #2 (2011)
Wang et al, China filled a poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) sponge fabricated by a gelatin porogen leaching method with fibrin gel to obtain a hybrid scaffold for chondrocytes culture in vitro. The fibrin gel evenly distributed in the hybrid scaffold with visible fibrinogen fibers after drying. In vitro culture it was found that in the hybrid scaffold the chondrocytes distributed more evenly and kept a round morphology as in the normal cartilage. Although the chondrocytes seeded in the control PLGA sponges showed similar proliferation behavior with that in the hybrid scaffolds, they were remarkably elongated, forming a fibroblast-like morphology. (RDC 2/12/2011)