Cartilage tissue engineering, an effective way to repair cartilage defects, requires an ideal scaffold to promote the regeneration performance of stem cells. Cartilage extracellular matrix (CECM) can imitate the living environment of cartilage cells to the greatest extent. CECM not only exhibits good biocompatibility with chondrocytes and stem cells, which can meet the basic requirements of scaffolds, but also promotes chondrocytes to secrete matrix and induce stem cells to differentiate into chondrocytes; as such, this matrix is a better scaffold and has more advantages than existing ones. The promotion and induction effects could be related to various cartilage-related proteins inside. However, the practical application of this technique is hindered by problems, such as poor mechanical properties and insufficient cell penetration of CECM. Association with other materials can compensate for these inadequacies to a certain degree, and finding a combination mode with optimized performance is the application trend of CECM. This review focuses on research of CECM materials in cartilage tissue engineering.
软骨组织工程是修复软骨缺损的有效方式，需要理想的支架材料促进干细胞发挥再生性能。软骨细胞外基质（CECM）能够有效地模仿软骨细胞生存环境，不仅对软骨细胞和干细胞具有良好的生物相容性，满足支架材料的基本要求，还能够促进软骨细胞分泌基质和诱导干细胞向软骨细胞分化，是一种极具优势的支架材料。CECM良好的促基质分泌和诱导分化作用与其含有多种软骨相关蛋白有关。在实际应用中，CECM存在力学性能不强和细胞渗透不足等问题，联合其他材料能在一定程度上弥补其不足，因此寻找性能更加优化的复合方式是CECM的应用趋势。本文对CECM材料在软骨组织工程中的研究进展作一综述。.
Keywords: cartilage extracellular matrix; cartilage regeneration; cartilage tissue engineering; stem cells.