Abstract

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Living hyaline cartilage graft (LhCG) is a scaffold free 3D pure hyaline type cartilage engineered graft. It is fabricated based on the phase transfer cell culture method of chondrocytes in a multi-cavity scaffold build up on the mixture of alginate and gelatin microspheres. This graft has very good animal test result in terms of cartilage damage repair. However due to the source of the primary chondrocytes that are adopted in the fabrication of the graft, there is large batch to batch variance in the quality of the graft. Therefore in order to suit for the industrial purpose, the graft is adhered by bio-glue before the decellularization process. Genipin as a popular bio-glue is tested out in the work reported in this paper to figure out the best concentration generally appropriate for the graft. A concentration gradient of 2x from 0.05% to 0.4% are applied to the graft and compared with the control group of PBS. It is found that 0.05% genipin is too low to ensure the integrity of the graft throughout the harsh decellularization process, while the 0.2% and 0.4% concentrations are too high to allow the decellularization process. Therefore it is concluded in this paper that 0.1% concentration of genipin is the optimized concentration. In the future, to make sure the quality of the graft, chondrocytes quality control measurement are to be figured out. Otherwise, other tissue glues, other than genipin could be assayed to verify the effect of gelation for the LhCG graft.

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