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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Jan 10.
Published in final edited form as: MRS Commun. 2017 Oct 3;7(3):289–308. doi: 10.1557/mrc.2017.91

Fig. 7.

Fig. 7

Examples of bioreactor designs for maturation of tissue engineering interfacial tissues. (A) Osteochondral microfluidic bioreactor.[163] This bioreactor creates two microchannel arrays in a gel, separated by a non-channel gel slab in the center. Osteogenic and chondrogenic media are flowed through the microchannels allowing for diffusion into surrounding walls and through central slab, creating an interfacial construct. Reprinted with permission from Stephen M. Goldman, Gilda A. Barabino, Cultivation of agarose-based microfluidic hydrogel promotes the development of large, full-thickness, tissue-engineered articular cartilage constructs, John Wiley and Sons. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.[163] (B) Osteochondral bioreactor.[153] Chondrogenic and osteogenic media are continuously flowed through a scaffold, while maintaining separation of media baths through use of an O-ring. Histology shows interfacial region for construct: chondral component (CC) and osseous component (OC). Alizarin Red stains for calcium, Safranin-O stains for negatively charged molecules (GAGs), and fast green stains for proteins. This schematic was reprinted from <http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/mp500136b>. Further permissions related to the material excerpted should be directed to the ACS.[153] (C) Combination mechanical, chemical, and co-culture bioreactor for culturing meniscal enthesis constructs. These constructs consist of two bone plugs seeded with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) injected and connected with a high density collagen gel embedded with meniscal fibrochondrocytes (FCCs). The bone plugs are anchored down in the bioreactor using the walls, and then osteogenic media and meniscal media can be applied to different portions of the scaffold. Image shows distribution of co-cultured cells on constructs, and histology shows the morphology of the interfacial region of the construct (images courtesy of Leanne Iannucci). Reprinted from Acta Biomaterialia, Volume 56, Mary Clare McCorry, Melissa M. Mansfield, Xiaozhou Sha, Daniel J. Coppola, Jonathan W. Lee, Lawrence J. Bonassar, A model system for developing a tissue engineered meniscal enthesis, 110 – 117, Copyright © 2016, with permission from Elsevier.[59]