Characterization of a novel polyvinyl alcohol/chitosan porous hydrogel combined with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells and its application in articular cartilage repair

Abstract

Background Different substances are combined to compensate for each other’s drawbacks and create an appropriate biomaterial. A novel Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/chitosan (CS) porous hydrogel was designed and applied to the treatment of osteochondral defects. Methods Hydrogels of various PVA/CS ratios were tested for physiochemical and mechanical properties in addition to cytotoxicity and biocompatibility. The hydrogels with the best PVA/CS ratio were used in the animal study. Osteochondral defects were created at the articular cartilage of 18 rabbits. They were assigned to different groups randomly ( n = 6 per group): the osteochondral defect only group (control group), the osteochondral defect treated with hydrogel group (HG group), and the osteochondral defect treated with hydrogel loaded with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) group (HG-BMSCs group). The cartilage was collected for macro-observation and histological evaluation at 12 weeks after surgery. Results The Hydrogel with PVA/CS ratio of 6:4 exhibited the best mechanical properties; it also showed stable physical and chemical properties with porosity and over 90% water content. Furthermore, it demonstrated no cytotoxicity and was able to promote cell proliferation. The HG-BMSCs group achieved the best cartilage healing. Conclusions The novel PVA/CS porous composite hydrogel could be a good candidate for a tissue engineering material in cartilage repair. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12891-019-2644-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Structure and properties of PVA/silk fibroin hydrogels and their effects on growth behavior of various cell types

“…Such active components include hyaluronic acid [13], chitosan [16], gelatin [17], oligopeptides [18], and karaya gum [19]. For example, when preparing PVA/chitosan composite hydrogels, increasing the proportion of PVA from 80 wt% to 90 wt% changes the stem cell shape from polygonal to spherical [16]. This change in cell morphology on the PVA/chitosan composite hydrogel was consistent with that on our PVA/silk hydrogel (PVA 80 wt%).…”

“…Therefore, active components are usually introduced into PVA hydrogels through a physical or chemical process to facilitate stem cell growth and differentiation. Such active components include hyaluronic acid [13], chitosan [16], gelatin [17], oligopeptides [18], and karaya gum [19]. For example, when preparing PVA/chitosan composite hydrogels, increasing the proportion of PVA from 80 wt% to 90 wt% changes the stem cell shape from polygonal to spherical [16].…”

Nanobiocomposite based on natural polyelectrolytes for bone regeneration

“…Hydrogels were proposed as promising biomaterials for periodontal tissue engineering (Abou Neel, Chrzanowski, Salih, Kim, & Knowles, ; Chieruzzi et al, ) and cartilage regeneration (Li et al, ; Peng et al, ). Chitosan and chitosan‐based biopolymers have been widely studied because of its unique properties, remembrance of biological matrices and ability to form hydrogels (LogithKumar et al, ).…”

Optically activated and interrogated plasmonic hydrogels for applications in wound healing

“…In the future, we will verify the points drawn from the reference literature that chitosan/PVA scaffolds are suitable for cellular repopulation [67, 97, 98], antimicrobial protection and controlled drug release [18, 20, 21, 64–68, 76–78], and we will challenge the translation of our results from in vitro or ex vivo to in vivo.…”