Targeting infiltrating immune cells to improve articular cartilage regeneration

Statement of Purpose: The treatment of pathologies, like osteoarthritis (OA) associated to the loss of cartilage due to traumatic injuries is still lacking an effective therapy. Articular cartilage has very limited intrinsic healing possibilities¹. Consequently, traumatic and degenerative lesions of articular cartilage eventually progress to osteoarthritis, a leading source of disability worldwide. Full thickness chondral defects are the more frequent traumatic injuries resulting in OA. Currently focal lesions treatments have proposed different regenerative approaches that aim to restore the homeostasis of the damaged tissue. The challenge is high: we need to develop a tissue engineering solution capable of concurrently stimulating the hyaline cartilage formation while preventing inflammatory and fibrotic reactions that results in OA. We hypothesize that a biomaterial able to control the inflammatory environment (tuning the infiltrating macrophages toward an anti-inflammatory phenotype) of the cartilage will promote cartilage regrowth limiting post-traumatic osteoarthritis degeneration² (Figure 1).