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REVIEW
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Mechanical environment for in vitro cartilage tissue engineering assisted by in silico models

Rob Jess1,2 ,  Tao Ling3 ,  Yi Xiong3* ,  Chris J. Wright1 ,  Feihu Zhao1,2*
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1 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
2 Zienkiewicz Institute for Modelling, Data and AI, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
3 School of System Design and Intelligent Manufacturing, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China
BMT 2023 , 4(1), 18–26; https://doi.org/10.12336/biomatertransl.2023.01.004
Submitted: 27 December 2022 | Revised: 17 January 2023 | Accepted: 27 February 2023 | Published: 28 March 2023
Copyright © 2023 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 License.
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Abstract

Mechanobiological study of chondrogenic cells and multipotent stem cells for articular cartilage tissue engineering (CTE) has been widely explored. The mechanical stimulation in terms of wall shear stress, hydrostatic pressure and mechanical strain has been applied in CTE in vitro. It has been found that the mechanical stimulation at a certain range can accelerate the chondrogenesis and articular cartilage tissue regeneration. This review explicitly focuses on the study of the influence of the mechanical environment on proliferation and extracellular matrix production of chondrocytes in vitro for CTE. The multidisciplinary approaches used in previous studies and the need for in silico methods to be used in parallel with in vitro methods are also discussed. The information from this review is expected to direct facial CTE research, in which mechanobiology has not been widely explored yet.

Keywords
cartilage tissue engineering ; in silico modelling ; mechanical stimulation ; mechanobiology
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Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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