Issue 65, 2020, Issue in Progress

Injectable microfluidic hydrogel microspheres based on chitosan and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) as chondrocyte carriers

Abstract

Direct injection of chondrocytes in a minimally invasive way has been regarded as the significantly potential treatment for cartilage repair due to their ability to fill various irregular chondral defects. However, the low cell retention and survival after injection still limited their application in clinical transformation. Herein, we present chondrocyte-laden microspheres as cell carriers based on a double-network hydrogel by the combination of the chitosan and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA). The microfluidic technique was applied to prepare size-controllable chitosan/PEGDA hydrogel microspheres (CP-MSs) via the water-in-oil approach after photo-crosslinking and physical-crosslinking. The chondrocytes were laden on CP-MSs, which showed good cell viability and proliferation after long-term cell cultivation. The in vitro investigation further demonstrated that chondrocyte-laden CP-MSs were injectable and the cell viability was still high after injection. In particular, these cell-laden microspheres were self-assembled into a 3D cartilage-like scaffold by a bottom-up strategy based on cell–cell interconnectivity, which suggested that these injectable chondrocyte-laden microspheres showed potential applications as chondrocyte carriers for bottom-to-up cartilage tissue engineering.

Graphical abstract: Injectable microfluidic hydrogel microspheres based on chitosan and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) as chondrocyte carriers

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
26 Aug 2020
Accepted
14 Oct 2020
First published
29 Oct 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

RSC Adv., 2020,10, 39662-39672

Injectable microfluidic hydrogel microspheres based on chitosan and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) as chondrocyte carriers

L. Lin, Y. Wang, L. Wang, J. Pan, Y. Xu, S. Li, D. Huang, J. Chen, Z. Liang, P. Yin, Y. Li, H. Zhang, Y. Wu, C. Zeng and W. Huang, RSC Adv., 2020, 10, 39662 DOI: 10.1039/D0RA07318K

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements