Hydroxyapatite (HAP) has been the gold standard in the biomedical field due to its composition and similarity to human bone. Properties such as shape, size, morphology, and ionic substitution can be tailored through the use of different synthesis techniques and compounds. Regardless of the ability to determine its physicochemical properties, a conclusion for the correlation with the biological response it is yet to be found. Hence, a special focus on the most desirable properties for an appropriate biological response needs to be addressed. This review provides an overview of the fundamental properties of hydroxyapatite nanoparticles and the characterization of physicochemical properties involved in their biological response and role as a drug delivery system. A summary of the main chemical properties and applications of hydroxyapatite, the advantages of using nanoparticles, and the influence of shape, size, functional group, morphology, and crystalline phase in the biological response is presented. A special emphasis was placed on the analysis of chemical and physical interactions of the nanoparticles and the cargo, which was explained through the use of spectroscopic and physical techniques such as FTIR, Raman, XRD, SEM, DLS, and BET. We discuss the properties tailored for hydroxyapatite nanoparticles for a specific biomolecule based on the compilation of studies performed on proteins, peptides, drugs, and genetic material.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies have become an attractive manufacturing process to fabricate scaffolds in tissue engineering. Recent research has focused on the fabrication of alginate complex shaped structures that closely mimic biological organs or tissues. Alginates can be effectively manufactured into porous three-dimensional networks for tissue engineering applications. However, the structure, mechanical properties, and shape fidelity of 3D-printed alginate hydrogels used for preparing tissue-engineered scaffolds is difficult to control. In this work, the use of alginate/gelatin hydrogels reinforced with TiO2 and β-tricalcium phosphate was studied to tailor the mechanical properties of 3D-printed hydrogels. The hydrogels reinforced with TiO2 and β-TCP showed enhanced mechanical properties up to 20 MPa of elastic modulus. Furthermore, the pores of the crosslinked printed structures were measured with an average pore size of 200 μm. Additionally, it was found that as more layers of the design were printed, there was an increase of the line width of the bottom layers due to its viscous deformation. Shrinkage of the design when the hydrogel is crosslinked and freeze dried was also measured and found to be up to 27% from the printed design. Overall, the proposed approach enabled fabrication of 3D-printed alginate scaffolds with adequate physical properties for tissue engineering applications.

In this work, we use the rule of mixtures to develop an equivalent material model in which the total strain energy density is split into the isotropic part related to the matrix component and the anisotropic energy contribution related to the fiber effects. For the isotropic energy part, we select the amended non-Gaussian strain energy density model, while the energy fiber effects are added by considering the equivalent anisotropic volumetric fraction contribution, as well as the isotropized representation form of the eight-chain energy model that accounts for the material anisotropic effects. Furthermore, our proposed material model uses a phenomenological non-monotonous softening function that predicts stress softening effects and has an energy term, derived from the pseudo-elasticity theory, that accounts for residual strain deformations. The model’s theoretical predictions are compared with experimental data collected from human vaginal tissues, mice skin, poly(glycolide-co-caprolactone) (PGC25 3-0) and polypropylene suture materials and tracheal and brain human tissues. In all cases examined here, our equivalent material model closely follows stress-softening and residual strain effects exhibited by experimental data.

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