Contributions of stem cell engineering to new therapies for joint and bone diseases

Stem cells are distinguished by their ability to proliferate, self-renew, and differentiate into mature functional cells in a cell-lineage-specific manner. These cells both can directly serve as a base material for cell therapy and indirectly as a source from which tissue models can be derived for drug development and disease treatment. Stem cell systems face challenges due to their highly dynamic and heterogeneous nature, impeding advancements in cell therapy, endogenous repair, disease modeling, and tissue engineering approaches. Stem cell engineering can help to overcome these obstacles and speed up the development of stem cell-based therapies. The goal of stem cell engineering is to develop strategies for manipulating stem cells and enabling predictable control over the regulation of stem cell fate, in which a series of strategic manipulations of the stem cell population robustly produces desired outcomes. In bone and joint diseases, stem cells are frequently genetically modified and loaded onto special biomaterials or scaffolds, which can preserve stem cell function in culture, improve survival of transplanted cells, and guide tissue regeneration. In this chapter, we present an overview of several types of stem cell engineering (genetic engineering, bone tissue engineering, and high-throughput techniques) in bone and joint diseases from stem cell manipulation to the development of biomaterials or scaffolds.