Abstract
Recently, stem cell-based bone tissue engineering (BTE) has been recognized as a preferable and clinically significant strategy for bone repair. In this study, a pure 3D silk fibroin (SF) scaffold was fabricated as a BTE material using a lyophilization method. We aimed to investigate the efficacy of the SF scaffold with and without seeded human adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hASCs) in facilitating bone regeneration. The effectiveness of the SF-hASCs scaffold was evaluated based on physical characterization, biocompatibility, osteogenic differentiation in vitro, and bone regeneration in critical rat calvarial defects in vivo. The SF scaffold demonstrated superior biocompatibility and significantly promoted osteogenic differentiation of hASCs in vitro. At six and twelve weeks postimplantation, micro-CT showed no statistical difference in new bone formation amongst all groups. However, histological staining results revealed that the SF-hASCs scaffold exhibited a better bone extracellular matrix deposition in the defect regions compared to other groups. Immunohistochemical staining confirmed this result; expression of osteoblast-related genes (BMP-2, COL1a1, and OCN) with the SF-hASCs scaffold treatment was remarkably positive, indicating their ability to achieve effective bone remodeling. Thus, these findings demonstrate that SF can serve as a potential carrier for stem cells, to be used as an osteoconductive bioscaffold for BTE applications.