Journal of Tissue Science and Engineering

Every year many people die of cancer. Hopes give the extensive studies conduct worldwide on the new anticancer agents. New drugs are tested in both, in vitro and in vivo conditions. This model is recognized as a standard all around the world. On the other hand many organizations attempt to decrease experimental work on animal models, suggesting that in vivo tests are unethical and probably useless. We would like to show the differences between in vitro and in vivo conditions. This review is aimed to emphasize the differences related to receptors, hormones, bioavailability, enzymatic influence, vasculature, age, severity of disease and contamination of cell lines. It seems that it is not possible to abolish in vivo studies in testing any anticancer agent nowadays. The question is how extensive experiments on animal should be.

Over the last decade, electrospinning to create non-woven fabrics composed of nano- and micrometer diameters fibers has gone from an unknown process to commonplace in the tissue engineering community. Unfortunately, the majority of the scaffolds fabricated have an extremely limited capacity to promote three-dimensional tissue regeneration. This is because the fine pore structure created in the scaffolding limits cellular infiltration, thus acting more as a pseudo two-dimensional surface for enhanced cell adhesion. Hence the challenge, as the use of electrospinning for fabricating tissue engineering scaffolding moves toward functional, three-dimensional tissue engineered constructs, will be to enhance the overall porosity without compromising overall structural integrity. This is a critical challenge yet to be overcome. If this processing deficiency cannot be corrected, it is highly probable that the process of electrospinning will be considered a failure in developing tissue engineering scaffolds.

Goal: This study evaluated clinical and radiological results of autologous bone marrow transplantation (BMT) for early stage osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH) and analyzed prognostic factors. Materials and Methods: From November 2003 to January 2006, 49 hips in 43 patients with early stage ONFH underwent autologous BMT were followed for at least 2 years. For clinical results, preoperative and postoperative Harris hip score (HSS) were evaluated and survival rate was obtained at the point of performing the total hip arthroplasty. Radiologic results were assessed by changes in necrosis size on MRI performed preoperatively and postoperatively. To evaluate prognostic factors, survival rate was analyzed according to age, gender, etiology, and duration of the symptom.
Results: Postoperative average HHS was significantly increased and there were no significant changes in necrosis size on MRI. Eleven of the 79 hips were required the arthroplasty and the group with use of steroid and short duration of symptom less than 6 months showed lower survival rate.
Conclusion: Autologous BMT for early ONFH can be one of the treatments to improve clinical feature and delay radiologic progress. However the steroid-induced ONFG and short duration of symptom seemed to be poor prognostic factors.