Towards Personalized Regenerative Medicine Therapies for Treating the Knee Meniscus

There is a great need in the clinics to regenerate the knee meniscus. Over 1,000 surgical interventions related with meniscus are performed every day in Europe, and most of them include at least partial removal of meniscus. The lack of functional meniscus tissue leads damages in the knee joint and can cause osteoarthritis. The regenerative medicine strategies have been evolving from the traditional tissue engineering concept towards personalized treatments. The meniscus tissue was segmented from the high-quality volumetric MRI images of the patient’s knee, and processed into a 3D model that is a one-to-one replica of the patient’s meniscus in terms of size and shape. A high concentration of aqueous silk fibroin solution was introduced into a 3D porous matrix of polycaprolactone that was bioprinted according to the 3D model. The present study showed the use of medical imaging and segmentation coupled with 3D-printing to manufacture anatomically correct patient specific scaffolds. Herein, important steps towards a personalized regenerative medicine therapy model for the knee meniscus were addressed. Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the MultiScaleHuman project (Contract number: MRTN-CT-2011-289897) in the Marie Curie Actions—Initial Training Networks for the financial support. The authors would like to thank the University Hospital of Geneva for the collaboration. J.M. Oliveira also thanks to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for the funds provided to under the program Investigador FCT 2012 (IF/00423/2012).