{"doi":"10.1002/adhm.202500552","title":"Evaluation of Engineered Cartilage Composition and Function Using Raman Spectroscopy","abstract":"A Raman spectroscopy-based platform has tremendous potential to non-destructively monitor the evolving composition of tissue-engineered cartilage (TEC) responsible for its mechanical properties from in vitro cultivation to post-implantation in vivo function. Raman spectroscopy, an inelastic light scattering technique, reflects the biochemical building blocks (amides, sulfates, and hydroxyls) comprising a tissue. Here, an arthroscopy-compatible probe acquires Raman spectra, and a multivariate linear decomposition routine extracts the regression coefficient biomarkers that reflect the contribution of extracellular matrix (ECM) constituents (sulfated glycosaminoglycans [sGAG], collagen, water) and the scaffold biomaterial to the tissue spectra. Repeated Raman acquisitions during cultivation do not alter growth of chondrocyte-seeded-agarose constructs. The Raman-derived ECM biomarkers portray the composition of the evolving neocartilage developed on agarose, hyaluronan, collagen, and polyethylene-glycol scaffolds, accounting for 90%, 78%, and 87% of content variation in sGAG, collagen, and water, and 94% of the variation in stiffness. The ECM biomarkers reveal variability in sGAG and collagen content for constructs infused with donor chondrocytes from a 58-year-old/female, a 36-year-old/male, and a 53-year-old/male, accounting for 81% and 87% of the variation in stiffness and sGAG content. This Raman platform offers a transformative approach enabling optimization of construct fabrication, improving preclinical evaluation, and advancing cartilage regenerative therapies.","journal":"Advanced Healthcare Materials","year":2025,"id":547452,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9591,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1440309,"name":"Carolina V. Cordova","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1169976,"name":"Tianbai Wang","orcid":"0000-0003-3723-8488","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1383282,"name":"Erik E. Ersland","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1439848,"name":"Juncheng Zhang","orcid":"0000-0002-1479-1793","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":651564,"name":"Steven J. Staffa","orcid":"0000-0002-7588-7596","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":456215,"name":"Thomas P. Schaer","orcid":"0000-0002-4340-8212","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":290956,"name":"Mark W. Grinstaff","orcid":"0000-0002-5453-3668","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":399141,"name":"Brian D. Snyder","orcid":"0000-0003-1482-9509","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1382819,"name":"Mads S. Bergholt","orcid":"0000-0003-3986-8942","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1133474,"name":"Michael B. Albro","orcid":"0000-0002-3071-0252","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1382818,"name":"Dev R. Mehrotra","orcid":"0000-0001-5494-4291","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":56,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:53:41.314800Z","pmid":"41047516","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}