“…In order for congruent degradation to occur, some covalent bonds are needed between the organic and inorganic components (Figure 5 A). Examples are silica/natural polymers: e.g., silica/gelatin (Ren et al, 2002 ; Mahony et al, 2010 , 2014 ), silica/poly(gamma-glutamic acid) (Poologasundarampillai et al, 2010 , 2012 , 2014 ; Valliant et al, 2013 ), silica/chitosan (Shirosaki et al, 2005 , 2010 ; Connell et al, 2014 ), silica/polyester (Rhee et al, 2002 , 2004 ; Pandis et al, 2015 ), and silica/PEG (Liu et al, 2012 ; Russo et al, 2013 ; Catauro et al, 2015 ; Li et al, 2015 ). The foaming method (Figure 5 B) can be introduced to the sol–gel hybrid process (Mahony et al, 2010 , 2014 ) or the sol to gel transition can be used to 3-D print the hybrids (Gao et al, 2013 ).…”