“…However, cartilage tissue engineering systems with either cell type have been shown to be successful in some cases and to different extents in various animal models (Grässel and Anders, 2012). Although large animal models (such as pigs, goats, and horses) may more closely resemble the human system, the herein used rabbit model is one of the well accepted small animal models for evaluation of GF or cell-loaded scaffolds in cartilage defects (Sellers et al, 1997;Sellers et al, 2000;Rudert, 2002;Shao et al, 2006;Holland et al, 2007;Qi et al, 2009;Im and Lee, 2010;Jiang et al, 2010;Tokuhara et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2011;Qi et al, 2011;Yang et al, 2011;Qi et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2013). Additional to the choice of an adequate animal model, there are still a number of challenges to be overcome in the search for optimum cartilage repair conditions as e.g., the recognition of the optimal cell source, scaffolds, and GFs.…”