Biomaterials and tissue engineering scaffolds play a central role to repair bone defects. Although ceramic derivatives have been historically used to repair bone, hybrid materials have emerged as viable alternatives. The rationale for hybrid bone biomaterials is to recapitulate the native bone composition to which these materials are intended to replace. In addition to the mechanical and dimensional stability, bone repair scaffolds are needed to provide suitable microenvironments for cells. Therefore, scaffolds serve more than a mere structural template suggesting a need for better and interactive biomaterials. In this review article, we aim to provide a summary of the current materials used in bone tissue engineering. Due to the ever-increasing scientific publications on this topic, this review cannot be exhaustive; however, we attempted to provide readers with the latest advance without being redundant. Furthermore, every attempt is made to ensure that seminal works and significant research findings are included, with minimal bias. After a concise review of crystalline calcium phosphates and non-crystalline bioactive glasses, the remaining sections of the manuscript are focused on organic-inorganic hybrid materials.
Biomedical applications ranging from tissue engineering to drug delivery systems require versatile biomaterials based on the scalable and tunable production of biopolymer nanofibers under physiological conditions. These requirements can be successfully met by a novel extrusion process through nanoporous aluminum oxide templates, which is presented in this study. With this simple method we are able to control the nanofiber diameter by chosing the size of the nanopores and the concentration of the biopolymer feed solution. Nanofiber assembly into different hierarchical fiber arrangements can be achieved with a wide variety of different proteins ranging from the intracellular proteins actin, α-actinin and myosin to the extracellular matrix components collagen, fibronectin, fibrinogen, elastin and laminin. The extrusion of nanofibers can even be applied to the polysaccharides hyaluronan, chitosan and chondroitin sulphate. Moreover, blends of different proteins or proteins and polysaccharides can be extruded into composite nanofibers. With these features our template-assisted extrusion process will lead to new avenues in the development of nanofibrous biomaterials.
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