Recent Methods to Facilitate Articular Cartilage Regeneration by Targeting HIF-1α

Articular cartilage is known to have meager capacity of regeneration, and how to effectively promote repair of it has therefore been a complex issue. Hypoxia inducible factor 1 alpha (HIF-1α), a transcription factor observed to participate in diverse physiological processes, also has been found to play roles in chondrocyte differentiation as well as cartilage homeostasis. This makes manipulation of HIF-1α a potential approach to promote cartilage regeneration and has been widely explored. This review highlights several recent approaches to modulate HIF-1α expression to improve articular cartilage condition: Hydrogel artificial extracellular matrices loaded with HIF-1α-promoting reagents effectively upregulate chondrogenic markers and stabilized cartilage tissue; the combination of PLGA microspheres loading HIF-1α-promoting reagents and PLLA nanofibrous scaffolds yielded similar effectiveness. microRNA-17 was found to restrict the overexpression of HIF-1α and thereby help maintain cartilage homeostasis. Casticin, a natural compound extracted from herbal medicine, has been reported to inhibit inflammatory factors, as well as HIF-1α, and improve the survival of chondrocytes. This review aims to provide comprehensive knowledge of the recent research on HIF-1α target cartilage regeneration, and purpose novel suggestions and insights for the future development of the field.