Type II collagen scaffolds repair critical-sized osteochondral defects under induced conditions of osteoarthritis in rat knee joints via inhibiting TGF-β-Smad1/5/8 signaling pathway.

"Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

"Fig. 1 and Supplemental Figures were partly generated using Servier Medical Art (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license) and Figdraw. This work was supported by General Research Fund, Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong SAR (CityU 11205520 to Dong-An Wang); 10.13039/501100001809National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC51973180 to Dong-An Wang); Grant from 10.13039/501100004047Karolinska Institutet Ming Wai Lau Centre of Reparative Medicine (to Dong-An Wang); and, Grants from 10.13039/100007567City University of Hong Kong (7020028, 7005949, 9231412, 9231486 to Dong-An Wang); Young scientists lifting project of 10.13039/501100002949Jiangsu Province, China (TJ-2022-072 to Hang Yao). Xu Hu: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Min Jin: Validation, Software, Methodology. Kang Sun: Validation, Software. Zhen Zhang: Validation, Software. Zhonglian Wu: Methodology, Software. Junli Shi: Methodology, Software. Peilai Liu: Writing – review & editing, Resources, Conceptualization. Hang Yao: Writing – review & editing, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Dong-An Wang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization."