MINI REVIEW article
Front. Cell Dev. Biol.
Sec. Cell Adhesion and Migration
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Bone and Soft Tissue Repair: Bioengineering from Cellular Insights to Clinical ApplicationsView all 8 articles
Oxygen-releasing biomaterials for osteoarthritis: advances in managing the hypoxic joint microenvironment
Provisionally accepted
- West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
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Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease characterized by cartilage degeneration and osteophyte formation, with no fundamentally effective therapies currently available. Existing treatments are mainly symptomatic (e.g. drug injections and joint replacement) and cannot reverse the pathological progression, resulting in limited efficacy. A hypoxic microenvironment is a significant barrier to OA treatment: increased inflammatory cells in the synovium lead to higher oxygen consumption, causing cartilage hypoxia that exacerbates inflammation via hypoxia-inducible factors and accelerates cartilage damage. In recent years, research on oxygen-generating biomaterials targeting joint hypoxia has become a hot topic. Such materials continuously release oxygen through mechanisms like peroxide decomposition, enzyme-catalyzed reactions, or photosynthetic microbes, thereby increasing local oxygen partial pressure, relieving tissue hypoxia, and suppressing oxidative stress, which is expected to promote cartilage regeneration. This review systematically explores the hypoxia-induced pathogenic mechanisms of OA, innovatively categorizes and describes the fabrication strategies of oxygen-releasing biomaterials developed in recent years, analyzes their potential molecular mechanisms in OA therapy, and highlights current limitations in oxygen-release controllability and biosafety, as well as future research directions.
Keywords: Oxygen therapy, Oxygen-releasing biomaterials, Osteoarthritis, bone tissue engineering, hypoxic microenvironmen
Received: 12 Sep 2025; Accepted: 23 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Chen, Huang, Liu, Zhao and Deng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiangtian Deng, 350144946@qq.com
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