Post-Doctoral Fellow Centre for Translational Stem Cell Biology, China (People's Republic)
Abstract: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic degenerative disease characterized by the progressive erosion of articular cartilage. Current OA treatments fail to restore damaged cartilage, highlighting the urgent need for regenerative strategies. Pluripotent stem cells have emerged as a promising solution for cartilage regeneration, as they can be patient-derived and allow for directed differentiation. Developmentally, articular cartilage originates from the lateral plate mesoderm and matures within the long bones. However, most existing articular cartilage regeneration studies focus on chondrocytes derived from the paraxial mesoderm, leading to a gap in leveraging the authentic developmental lineage to replenish the joint chondrogenic loss. To address this gap, our project applies the expanded potential stem cell (EPSC) to recapitulate the developmental trajectory of lateral plate mesoderm-derived cartilage. Our goal is to establish a robust and scalable chondrogenesis platform for in vitro cartilage regeneration research. We have established an in-house protocol to generate cartilage-like pellets and employed single-cell transcriptomic analyses to evaluate how the protocol recaptures key in vivo chondrogenic pathways. To improve differentiation homogeneity, we are using CRISPR-Cas9-edited reporter cell lines to enable precise comparative analyses between well-differentiated chondrogenic cells and other cell types. Our work will contribute to the development of personalized, stem cell-based therapies for OA patients.
