Post Doctoral Fellow The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract: Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most prevalent joint diseases worldwide, causing progressive degeneration of articular cartilage and subchondral bone on weight-bearing joints such as the knees and hips. Available conservative and surgical treatments remain inadequate due to the lack of effective disease-modifying options. Tissue engineering enables innovative therapeutic approaches to restore, replace or regenerate the site of damage. In the context of OA, cartilage and osteochondral tissue engineering requires large quantities of cells to effectively fabricate cartilage grafts or osteochondral constructs of sufficient size. Infrapatellar fat-pad derived MSCs (IFP-MSCs) exhibit advantageous properties over bone marrow derived MSCs (BM-MSCs), including the absence of age-dependent decline in cell proliferation and differentiation potential. In this study, the ability of human IFP-MSCs (hIFP-MSCs) to differentiate towards chondrogenic and osteogenic lineages was assessed, hIFP-MSC derived cartilage and bone microtissues were also compared to those derived from human BM-MSCs (hBM-MSCs). Our results demonstrated that hIFP-MSCs developed superior cartilage and bone microtissues compared to hBM-MSCs under identical differentiation conditions. Specifically, hIFP-MSC derived cartilage microtissue exhibited better cartilaginous matrix formation with significantly higher quantification of glycosaminoglycan and hydroxyproline, whereas hIFP-MSC derived bone microtissue demonstrated significantly higher calcium content. These findings suggest that IFP-MSCs hold potential as a viable alternative MSC source for cartilage and osteochondral tissue engineering, paving the way for future OA-related therapeutics.
Funding Source: This work was financially supported by Research Grants Council, Healthy Longevity Catalyst Awards (Hong Kong, China) 2022; Research Impact Fund 2025 (R-7036-20) ; ITC Tier 3 (ITS/293/21); ITC Raise+ (RAI/23/1/040A)
