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Re:Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords by vervez on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @10:55PM (#29400488)
Bioengineer here able to chime in with niche expertise. Cartilage is and has been a holy grail in biomedical engineering but is very difficult to grow and transplant. There have been some successful neo-cartilage projects but integrating that into a defect and successfully integrating with host cartilage is the problem. The boundary of the defect actually has electronegative components that actively oppose integration of host and transplant (synthetic) cartilage. I think the most likely solution won't be a tissue-engineered transplant but rather an active cellular component that appropriately responds, and builds upon, this negative feedback cycle via cellular programming.
Re:Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords by xwdv on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @11:55PM (#29400828)
Could we harvest cartilage from other animals? Such as pigs perhaps.
Re:Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords by vervez on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:02AM (#29405096)
That's a strategy but there are issues with immune rejection since that's a xenograft. I think there are some products based off of this concept for other areas (skin grafts) after removing all xeno-cells from the tissue, but articular cartilage is more difficult to remove/replace xeno-cells with autologous or allogenic cells.
Re:Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords by scheme271 on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @01:12AM (#29401196)
I think cadavers are the typical source. Since there's no blood vessels in it, tissue rejection isn't as much of a concern.