| Tissue engineering is composed of three elements, i.e, the seed cell, the cytokine and the scaffold. Several studys suggested that fibroblast has the ability to form osteoblast during the healing of bone fracture. Another research mentioned that the cultured skin fibroblast formed bone tissue in vitro. That's the reason why the fibroblast is classified as the inducible osteoprogenitor cells (IOPC) and is regared as one of the seed cells that have the potential to form bone during the research of bone tissue engineering. But there still has been no information on the condition under which could fibroblast be transformed into osteoblast and has its osteogenic phenotype expression increased. The family members of bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) could induce ectopic bone formation (except BMP-1) and has the ability to induce the undifferentiated mesenchymal cells to transform into osteoblast. The genes of the BMP family member have all been cloned at the moment. Basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) has strong effect on the division and proliferation of the cells. It's one of the important cytokines to promote the mitosis and morphogenesis. There also has been the data suggesting that the dexamathasone (Dex) could promote the osteogenic phenotype expression of... |
