Preliminary Development Of Tissue Engineering Ligament

Anterior cruciate ligament(ACL) is crucial for the stabilization of knee. On the one hand it restrains excessive forward movement of the lower leg bone (the tibia) in relation to the thigh bone (the femur), on the other hand, It limits rotational movements of the knee. Unfortunately, the incidence of ACL injury is very high and can lead to episodic instability, chondral and meniscal injury, and early osteoarthritis, however, there is no efficient clinical treatment can fully reconstruct the injured ACL. The newly developed approach of tissue engineering has been shown to be great potential on the ACL reconstruction.Seeding cells and scaffold are two main factors of tissue engineering. We choose the marrow mesenchymal stem cells(MSCs) as our seeding cells and degummed silk as scaffold material. In order to ameliorate the surface property of silk, we add a collagen-coating layer on it.At first, we tested three different degumming reagent including Na₂CO₃,NaHCO₃ and trypsin. Na₂CO₃ was picked out for the ability of preserving the mechanic integrity of silk and the low cost. And then we investigated the degumming rate under different temperature, time, and reagent concentration and confirmed the best degumming protocols. The examination of degummed silk suggested that the sericin can be totally removed under our degumming protocols.The simple twisting method was adopted by us for the sake of avoiding the damage of fibroin and the geometric hierarchy was 30(0) × 7(2) × 3(2) ×...