Scientists Grow Human Cartilage in the Lab with Stem Cells

Scientists have managed to successfully grow fully functional human cartilage from human stem cells derived from bone marrow tissue in a lab. The latest effort could be a giant leap forward for medical professionals.

"We've been able-for the first time-to generate fully functional human cartilage from mesenchymal stem cells by mimicking in vitro the developmental process of mesenchymal condesnation," said Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This could have clinical impact, as this cartilage can be used to repair a cartilage defect, or in combination with bone in a composite graft grown in lab for more complex tissue reconstruction."

Cartilage is crucial to the human body. It can be used to rebuild structures that have been damaged. While there's been great success in engineering pieces of cartilage using young animal cells, though, no one has been able to reproduce these results using adult human stem cells from bone marrow or fat. Yet now, scientists have managed to grow cartilage with physiologic architecture and strength by radically changing their approach.

The general approach to engineering cartilage tissue is to place cells into a hydrogel and culture them in the presence of nutrients and growth factors. Yet using this method with adult human stem cells has resulted in weak cartilage. That's why researchers came up with another plan.

In this case, the scientists induced the mesenchymal stem cells to undergo a condensation stage as they do in the body before starting to make cartilage. This major departure resulted in high quality human cartilage.

"Our whole approach to tissue engineering is biomimetic in nature, which means that our engineering designs are defined by biological principles," said Vunjak-Novakovic in a news release. "This approach has been effective in improving the quality of many engineered tissues-from bone to heart. Still, we were really surprised to see that our cartilage, grown by mimicking some aspects of biological development, was as strong as 'normal' human cartilage."

The findings could be huge in terms to creating cartilage for use in the medical field. By being able to develop strong cartilage, scientists can use it to help with procedures and help those in need.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.