Abstract
Articular cartilage is avascular and aneural, and has limited capacity for self-regeneration when injured. Tissue engineering has emerged as a promising approach in repairing cartilage defects. To improve the therapy of cartilage healing, the present study investigated the efficacy of the combination of lentivirus-mediated bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP2) in bone marrow-derived stromal cells (BMSCs) and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) on cartilage and bone healing in a cartilage defect model using the rabbit knee. The BMSCs were harvested from New Zealand rabbits and transduced with lentivirus carrying BMP-2. Standard bone defects were introduced in the femoral groove of patellofemoral joints of 48 New Zealand rabbits. The cartilage defects were subjected to synthetic scaffold mosaicplasty with chitosan/silk fibroin/nanohydroxyapatite particles tri-component scaffolds soaked in BMSCs and PRP. After 16 weeks, the tissue specimens were assessed by micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and macroscopic examination. The results showed that lentivirus-mediated BMP-2 and PRP increased the cell viability of the BMSCs, induced the expression of associated genes and enhanced osteogenic differentiation in vitro. In vivo, the expression of BMP-2 was observed for 16 weeks. The combination of BMP-2 and PRP treatment led to optimal results, compared with the other groups on micro-CT and gross observations. The results of the present study present a novel therapy using the lentivirus-mediated BMP-2 gene together with PRP for cartilage healing.