As articular cartilages have rarely healed by themselves because of their characteristics of avascularity and low cell density, surgical intervention is ideal for patients with cartilaginous injuries. Because of structural characteristics of the cartilage tissue, a three-dimensional culture of stem cells in biomaterials is a favorable system on cartilage tissue engineering. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are a new cell source in cartilage tissue engineering for its characteristics of self-renewal capability and pluripotency. However, the optimal cultivation condition for chondrogenesis of iPSCs is still unknown. Here we show that a novel chondrogenic differentiation method of iPSCs using the combination of three-dimensional cultivation in ultra-purified alginate gel (UPAL gel) and multi-step differentiation via mesenchymal stem cell-like cells (iPS-MSCs) could efficiently and specifically differentiate iPSCs into chondrocytes. The iPS-MSCs in UPAL gel culture sequentially enhanced the expression of chondrogenic marker without the upregulation of that of osteogenic and adipogenic marker and histologically showed homogeneous chondrogenic extracellular matrix formation. Our results suggest that the pluripotency of iPSCs can be controlled when iPSCs are differentiated into iPS-MSCs before embedding in UPAL gel. These results lead to the establishment of an efficient three-dimensional system to engineer artificial cartilage tissue from iPSCs for cartilage regeneration. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 107A: 1086-1093, 2019.
Keywords: alginate gel; cartilage repair; chondrogenic differentiation; iPS cells; mesenchymal stem cells.
© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.