Cryopreservation of articular cartilage. Part 1: Conventional cryopreservation methods

There is increasing interest in the possibility of treating diseased or damaged areas of synovial joint surfaces by grafts of healthy allogeneic cartilage. Such grafts could be obtained from cadaver tissue donors or in the future they might be manufactured by ‘tissue engineering’ methods. Cartilage is an avascular tissue and hence is immunologically privileged but to take advantage of this is the graft must contain living cells. Preservation methods that achieve this are required to build up operational stocks of grafts, to provide a buffer between procurement and use, and to enable living grafts of a practical size to be provided at the right time for patient and surgeon. Review of the literature shows that it has been relatively straightforward to cryopreserve living isolated chondrocytes, but at the present time there is no satisfactory method to preserve cartilage between the time of procurement or manufacture and surgical use. In this paper, we review the relevant literature and we confirm that isolated ovine chondrocytes in suspension can be effectively cryopreserved by standard methods yet the survival of chondrocytes in situ in cartilage tissue is inadequate and extremely variable.