Fibronectin-coating enhances attachment and proliferation of mesenchymal stem cells on a polyurethane meniscal scaffold
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Partial meniscectomy is one of the most common surgical strategy for a meniscal injury, but sometimes, patients complain of knee pain due to an overload in the ablated compartment. In these cases, implantation of tissue engineering scaffold could be indicated. Currently, two commercial scaffolds, based on collagen or polycaprolactone-polyurethane (PCL-PU), are available for meniscus scaffolding. In short term follow-up assessments, both showed clinical improvement and tissue formation. However, long-term studies carried out in PCL-PU showed that the new tissue decreased in volume and assumed an irregular shape. Moreover, in some cases, the scaffold was totally reabsorbed, without new tissue formation. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) combined with scaffolds could represents a promising approach for treating meniscal defects because of their multipotency and self-renewal. In this work, we aimed to compare the behaviour of MSCs and chondrocytes on a PCL-PU scaffold in vitro. MSCs express integrins that binds to fibronectin (FN), so we also investigate the effect of a FN coating on the bioactivity of the scaffold. We isolated rabbit bone marrow MSCs (rBM-MSCs) from two skeletally mature New Zealand white rabbits and stablished the optimum culture condition to expand them. Then, they were seeded over non-coated and FN-coated scaffolds and cultured in chondrogenic conditions. To evaluate cell functionality, we performed an MTS assay to compare cell proliferation between both conditions. Finally, a histologic study was performed to assess extracellular matrix (ECM) production in both samples, and to compare them with the ones obtained with rabbit chondrocytes (rCHs) seeded in a non-coated scaffold. A culture protocol based on low FBS concentration was set as the best for rBM-MSCs expansion. The MTS assay revealed that rBM-MSCs seeded on FN-coated scaffolds have more cells on proliferation (145%; 95% CI: 107%–182%) compared with rBM-MSCs seeded on non-coated scaffolds. Finally, the histologic study demonstrated that rCHs seeded on non-coated scaffolds displayed the highest production of ECM, followed by rBM-MSCs seeded on FN-coated scaffolds. Furthermore, both cell types produced a comparable ECM pattern. These results suggest that MSCs have low capacity attachment to PCL-PU scaffolds, but the presence of integrin alpha5beta1 (FN-receptor) in MSCs allows them to interact with the FN-coated scaffolds. These results could be applied in the design of scaffolds, and might have important clinical implications in orthopaedic surgery of meniscal injuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".