title: Mesenchymal stem cell-based therapy for cartilage repair: a review.
abstract: Articular cartilage injury remains one of the major concerns in orthopaedic surgery. Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) transplantation has been introduced to avoid some of the side effects and complications of current techniques. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on MSC-based cell therapy for articular cartilage repair to determine if it can be an alternative treatment for cartilage injury. MSCs retain both high proliferative potential and multipotentiality, including chondrogenic differentiation potential, and a number of successful results in transplantation of MSCs into cartilage defects have been reported in animal studies. However, the use of MSCs for cartilage repair is still at the stage of preclinical and phase I studies, and no comparative clinical studies have been reported. Therefore, it is difficult to make conclusions in human studies. This requires randomized clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of MSC-based cell therapy for cartilage repair.
authors.affiliation: Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center, Norwegian School of Sports Sciences, PO Box 4014, Ullevaal Stadion, 0806 Oslo, Norway. koga-z@rg7.so-net.ne.jp
authors.forename: Hideyuki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Koga
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Engebretsen
authors.forename: Jan E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Brinchmann
authors.forename: Takeshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Muneta
authors.forename: Ichiro
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Sekiya