Cell-derived ECM

Dental caries is one of the most conunon oral diseases. Unless properly treated, dental caries will progress to pulpitis, periapical infections, and ultimately result in dental loss. Dental loss can canse not only physical but also psychological suffering that compromises an individual s self-esteem and quality of life (Pihlstrom et al., 2005 Polzer et al., 2010 Jung et al., 2011 Otsu et al., 2014). Traditional therapies in current dental practice often result in the loss of tooth sensitivity and viability. Novel approaches based on tissne-derived and stem cell-derived ECM have been suggested as alternatives, along with bioactive scaffolds for dental repair. 

In this chapter, the history, current status, and future use of the tissue- and cell-derived ECM for bone and dental repair will be discussed in detail. 

Cell-derived ECM has been coated on scaffolds to enhance the biocompatibility and osteoconductive properties of tissue-engineered scaffolds for bone repair (Decaris et al., 2012a Sadr et al., 2012 Pati et al., 2014). Cells are seeded on scaffolds to allow them to proliferate with or without osteogenic supplements, and then decellularization is performed, followed by the study of the reseeded cell behaviors on this ECM/scaf-fold construct and the evolution of bone healing in vivo. Numerous studies showed that cell expansion and differentiation capacities were significantly improved by... 

Kang, Y, Kim, S., Khademhosseini, A., Yang, Y, 2011. Creation of bony microenvironment with CaP and cell-derived ECM to enhance human bone-marrow MSC behavior and delivery of BMP-2. Biomaterials 32, 6119-6130. 

Another aspect of ECM related to both biospecific and physical characteristics of ECM concerns the formation of gradients of any of the above-listed signals to direct cellular behavior. Such gradients are, for instance, key to the signalling of chemokines such as stromal cell-derived factor-1 (SDF-1) for the... 

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