Mechanobiological models for intervertebral disc tissue engineering

Low back pain, which is often caused by disc degeneration, is a major health problem. Due to the limitations of the current treatments for degenerative disc disease, tissue engineering methods have been proposed. These methods present the opportunity to restore the functionality of the intervertebral disc by repairing or replacing the degenerated tissue. One of the major challenges in intervertebral disc tissue engineering is to recreate, in vitro, the physiological environment for optimal culturing of cells seeded in scaffolds constructs. So it is necessary to understand the link between the forces applied to a cell and its biological response. After a brief review of the fundamentals of the mechanical factors in tissue engineering, this plenary paper presents the mechanobiological models which are capable of optimizing the design parameters of the porous scaffolds and prediction of the stress distribution in different stages of the tissue engineering. On the basis of these infrastructure models and experimental results, we can gain a complete understanding of mechanobiology and the procedure of the tissue differentiation to finalize the setups of the instrumentations in intervertebral disc tissue engineering.