Brief description

Osteoarthritis (OA) is an inflammatory frequent joint disease, mainly affecting middle-aged and elderly population. A systematic epidemiologic study, estimate that about 27% of people ≥ 65 years old suffer a symptomatic osteoarthritis worldwide, and it has been predicted that up to 25 million of people will be affected by osteoarthritis within the 2020. Recent findings point out as osteoarthritis involves the osteochondral complex, which includes the articular cartilage, and the subchondral trabecular bone. The focus of this work is to clarify the role of subchondral bone in the development of osteoarthritis, and to study the underneath biochemical mechanism. The strong point of our research is the innovative approach based on the ex vivo culture of human tissues, which permits to study cartilage and bone simultaneously. Tissues were obtained from surgical waste of total knee replacement surgery, and were cultured within our advanced bioreactors under dynamic flow conditions.

Impact:

Our research aims to study the Osteoarthritis using a realistic ex vivo model based on human tissues. The employ of tissue is fundamental to analyze cartilage-bone crosstalk phenomena, and to establish their role in the development of osteoarthritis. Remarkably, human tissues are cultured within our advanced in vitro systems composed of biphasic bioreactors, which ensures tissues viability up to several week after harvesting and allows to investigate the osteoarthritis mechanism directly onto viable tissues. Our system represents an evolution of in vitro cell cultures, and may limits the employ of animal model to the preclinical trials. Interestingly, our system can also be adopted as drug screening platform, and open new perspective on the study of drugs pharmacokinetic.

Pipeline