Engineered scaffolds based on mesenchymal stem cells/preosteoclasts extracellular matrix promote bone regeneration

Recently, extracellular matrix-based tissue-engineered bone is a promising approach to repairing bone defects, and the seed cells are mostly mesenchymal stem cells. However, bone remodelling is a complex biological process, in which osteoclasts perform bone resorption and osteoblasts dominate bone formation. The interaction and coupling of these two kinds of cells is the key to bone repair. Therefore, the extracellular matrix secreted by the mesenchymal stem cells alone cannot mimic a complex bone regeneration microenvironment, and the addition of extracellular matrix by preosteoclasts may contribute as an effective strategy for bone regeneration. Here, we established the mesenchymal stem cell/preosteoclast extracellular matrix -based tissue-engineered bones and demonstrated that engineered-scaffolds based on mesenchymal stem cell/ preosteoclast extracellular matrix significantly enhanced osteogenesis in a 3 mm rat femur defect model compared with mesenchymal stem cell alone. The bioactive proteins released from the mesenchymal stem cell/ preosteoclast extracellular matrix based tissue-engineered bones also promoted the migration, adhesion, and osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells in vitro. As for the mechanisms, the iTRAQ-labeled mass spectrometry was performed, and 608 differentially expressed proteins were found, including the IGFBP5 and CXCL12. Through in vitro studies, we proved that CXCL12 and IGFBP5 proteins, mainly released from the preosteoclasts, contributed to mesenchymal stem cells migration and osteogenic differentiation, respectively. Overall, our research, for the first time, introduce pre-osteoclast into the tissue engineering of bone and optimize the strategy of constructing extracellular matrix–based tissue-engineered bone using different cells to simulate the natural bone regeneration environment, which provides new sight for bone tissue engineering.