The main aim here is to develop new tissue constructs spanning the cartilage/bone interface, in order to overcome current problems and provide clinical strategies for joint repair.
Novel biomaterials are currently being developed for vascular, cartilage and bone related applications.
Several innovative strategies for articular cartilage repair have been proposed; however many have subsequently failed as secure fixation of matrices or constructs to the osteochondral bone could not be achieved under load-bearing conditions.
One area of investigation is focused on generating a novel chitosan based scaffold for osteochndral repair, with unique spatially resolved characteristics.
Furthermore, scaffolds are also being developed as 2D and 3D structures to investigate human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) responses to varying substrate stiffness under mechanical loads. Also, a cost-effective method to tissue engineer an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) construct is being developed.