Chondrogenesis

Published Date: 19th July 2016

Publication Authors: , , ,

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Abstract

Conditions affecting cartilage through damage or age-related degeneration pose significant challenges to individual patients and their healthcare systems. The disease burden will rise in the future as life expectancy increases. This has resulted in vigorous efforts to develop novel therapies to meet current and future needs. Due to the limited regenerative capacity of cartilage, in vitro tissue engineering techniques have emerged as the favoured technique by which to develop replacements. Tissue engineering is mainly concerned with developing cartilage replacements in the form of chondrocyte suspensions and three-dimensional scaffolds seeded with chondrocytes. One major limiting factor in the development of clinically useful cartilage constructs is our understanding of the process by which cartilage is formed, chondrogenesis. For example, techniques of culturing chondrocytes in vitro have been used for decades, resulting in chondrocyte-like cells which produce an extracellular matrix of similar composition to native cartilage, but with inferior physical properties. It has now been realised that one aspect of chondrogenesis which had been ignored was the physical context in which cartilage exists in vivo. This has resulted in the development of bioreactor systems which aim to introduce various physical stresses to engineered cartilage in a controlled environment. This has resulted in some improvements in the quality of tissue engineered cartilage. This is but one example of how the knowledge of chondrogenesis has been translated into research practice. This paper aims to review what is currently known about the process of chondrogenesis and discusses how this knowledge can be applied to tissue engineering. In the present study, a computational based pharmacophore and structural analysis were performed on a series of piperidinyl urea derivatives, a limited number of compounds which have variation in structure and activities that exhibit hERG blocking and H3 antagonistic activities. The conducted QSAR studies demonstrated that the developed models are statistically significant, which have been confirmed through validation. The Q2 values for the models developed with hERG blocking activity are >0.8 and with the H3 antagonistic activity are >0.6. The descriptors contributed in the models show that the distributed polar properties on the vdW surface of the molecules are important for the hERG blocking activity. The vsurf_ descriptors (surface area, volume and shape) such as vsurf_DD13 and vsurf_Wp4 correlate with the H3 antagonistic activity of these compounds. The distances between the pharmacophore sites were measured in order to confirm their significance to the activities. The results reveal that the acceptor (acc), donor (don), hydrophobic (hyd) and aromatic/hydrophobic (aro/hyd) pharmacophore properties are favorable contours sites for both the activities. Also, our study reveals that the distance between the polar contours (acc, don, etc) has to be small for better hERG blocking activity. The distances between the aro/hyd to the polar groups should be higher for better hERG blocking activity. However, the H3 antagonistic activity for these series depends upon hydrophobic property of the molecules, particularly the hyd and the hyd/aro contours of the molecules. Hence, these results reveal the requirements on the structural properties and the distances between the pharmacophore contour sites of the molecules responsible for their hERG and H3 antagonistic activities. 

Mabvuure N; Hindocha S; Jordan D; Khan WS (2012)  Chondrogenesis and developments in our understanding . Current Stem Cell Research & Therapy. Published online 8 May 2012

 

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