In a bid to develop a new method for cartilage tissue engineering, researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have successfully used cartilage cells from cow knee joints. By creating a successful method with conditions conducive to growing healthy cartilage tissue, the findings could help lead to a new treatment cure for osteoarthritis using stem-cell-based tissue engineering.
Using primary bovine chondrocytes, the researchers improved methods to grow cartilage tissue in a laboratory environment, producing tissue similar to that normally present in the human joints. In future, these results may help the development of neocartilage production for actual cartilage repair. For this, stem cells could be grown to provide an unlimited amount of material for tissue engineering; however, more research is needed to improve the tissue quality and make it more structurally similar to the hyaline cartilage found in the human body.
Source: Science Daily 