Tissue engineering in orthopaedic sports medicine: current concepts

Tissue engineering (TE) has been revolutionising the concepts and therapeutic approaches for the treatment of different sports injuries. To overcome the drawbacks of the current treatments, TE-based strategies provided new possibilities, either in the treatment of defects, which were previously considered unrecoverable, but also in what concerns to the decrease of recovery time. Supported in three mainstream concepts, TE uses the combination of scaffolds, cells and biological factors to pursue a better functional regenerative process. Aware of the limitations of today's treatments, the scientific and medical communities have made great effort to apply, in the safest and most efficient manner, the panoply of new TE tools. However, it is important to understand that there is still a long way to go until these new approaches turn out to be the ‘gold standard’ treatment in the clinics. This review aims to overview the current concepts of TE applications in orthopaedic sports medicine under preclinical and clinical research applied to growth factors, scaffolds and stem cells.