Conventional treatments for tendinopathies are ineffective and most clinical interventions do not provide adequate recovery leaving this tissues more likely to suffer reinjures. Recently, cell based therapies has been shown to be effective for the treatment in connective tissue injuries, such as tendons. Our aim is to evaluate if local treatment with tenocytes conditioned medium promoves tissue and functional improvements in the calcaneal tendon of tenotomized mice. The calcaneal tendon cells of Swiss mice were cultured for conditioning culture medium that will be used as a treatment. The animals were subjected to right calcaneal tenotomy and treated with saline solution (SAL), DMEM without serum (DMEM) and DMEM conditioned in primary tenocyte culture (MC) and compared to the control group (CTRL). Tendon functionality was measured using the Achilles Functional Index (AFI) and mechanical sensitivity through the paw withdrawal threshold (PWT) using the Von Frey test. All analyzes were performed at 7, 14 and 21 days post-injury (dpi). For histological analysis, tissues were stained with HE. Statistics were performed by ANOVA-2 followed by Tukey's post test, p<0.01. The MC group showed functional improvement at 7° and 14°dpi (-40.4±12.6; -36.6±10.4) compared to the DMEM groups (-76.5±11.7; -71, 6±7.9, p<0.01) and SAL (-88.8±15; -71.4±12.6 p<0.01). The MC group showed improvement in the paw withdrawal threshold at 7° and 14°dpl (2.24±1.15; 2.66±1.06) compared to the DMEM groups (0.15±0.07; 0 .45±0.76 p<0.01) SAL (0.13±1.15; 0.77±0.95 p<0.01). In the histological analysis, the MC group showed better tissue organization with cells presenting a format more similar to the control group, while the SAL and DMEM groups were more different from this one. We conclude that treatment with tenocytes conditioned medium accelerates tendon recovery, promoving improvement in mechanical sensitivity, functionality and tissue organization in the proposed injury model.
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