Fabrication of Multicomponent Tissue-Like Constructs-Toward Spinal Motion Segment Tissue Engineering

IntroductionAllogenic spinal motion segment transplantation demonstrated promising results in treating late stage disk degeneration and stimulated immense interests of tissue engineering in the whole spinal motion segment from autologous cell source and safe biomaterials, solving the donor availability problem and potentially alleviating the degeneration and immunogenicity problems. Bioengineering complex tissues such as spinal motion segment is extremely challenging because it involves the integration of multiple tissues with distinct structures and composition such as lamellar annulus fibrosus (AF), gel-like nucleus pulposus (NP), cartilaginous endplate, and bony vertebra. Although attempts have been made to fabricate biphasic structures such as lamellar AF structure wrapping around a NP core, or bony block with cartilaginous structure, good methods integrating different tissue parts to form a combined unit are not available.In this study, a bioreactor-based method integrating multicomponent spinal moti...