Compositional editing of extracellular matrices by CRISPR/Cas9 engineering of human mesenchymal stem cell lines

Abstract Tissue engineering strategies predominantly rely on the production of living substitutes, whereby implanted cells actively participate in the regenerative process. Beyond cost and delayed graft availability, the patient-specific performance of engineered tissues poses serious concerns on their clinical translation ability. A more exciting paradigm consist in exploiting cell-laid, engineered extracellular matrices (eECM), which can be used as off-the-shelf materials. Here, the regenerative capacity solely relies on the preservation of the eECM structure and embedded signals to instruct an endogenous repair. We recently described the possibility to exploit custom human stem cell lines for eECM manufacturing. In addition to the conferred standardization, the availability of such cell lines opened avenues for the design of tailored eECMs by applying dedicated genetic tools. In this study, we aim at demonstrating the possibility of exploiting CRISPR/Cas9 as a high precision system for editing the composition and function of eECMs. To this end, human mesenchymal stromal/stem cell (hMSC) lines were modified to knockout VEGF and RUNX2 and assessed for their capacity to generate osteoinductive cartilage matrices. We report the successful editing of hMSCs, subsequently leading to targeted VEGF and RUNX2-knockout cartilage eECMs. Despite the absence of VEGF, eECMs retained full capacity to instruct ectopic endochondral ossification. Conversely, RUNX2-edited eECMs exhibited impaired hypertrophy which resulted in delayed bone formation in vivo. In summary, our approach can be harnessed to identify the necessary eECM factors driving endogenous repair. Our work paves the road towards the compositional eECMs editing and their exploitation in broad regenerative contexts.