Bioactive Fillers

Synthetic Biomedical Composites and Their Bioactivity 443 Table 22.2 Bioactive fillers used in tissue engineering applications. 

Bone regeneration through bioactive fillers is accelerated by the formation of a bonding layer with apatite structure that is reinforced with collagen. This apatite... 

Table 22.3 List of major bioactive filler suppliers.

An application of calcium carbonate as a bioactive filler was discussed by Kasuga et al. [19], who incorporated vaterite powders prepared by a carbonation process in methanol into a polylactic acid matrix. Composites containing 20-30 wt% vaterite... 

In order to improve the properties of the tissue engineering biomaterials nanostructured bioactive fillers have been investigated. Nanoparticles can disperse more uniformly in the polymer matrix, thus enhancing the coating characteristics of the apatite layer formed and also result in a better cell attachment and proliferation. 

Table 2 also shows a tendency of ts to increase when increasing the percentage of hydroxyapatite (HA), the bioactive filler added to the formulations in order to impart bioactive character to them. Non-sintered HA particles presented average size of 25-30 p.m diameter. Sintered HA was prepared by heating HA at 1200 C for 12 hours and subsequently crushing, milling and particle size classification (particles with an average diameter of... 

Solid bioactive fillers in polymeric biocomposites ideally would not only produce an environment conducive to osteoblast activity via ion release, but would also provide a surface conducive for cell attachment, integration, and proliferation. The presence... 

Over the past 30 years, an extensive body of research has evolved on UHMWPE composites for biomedical applications. Because of its powder size and melt viscosity, UHMWPE poses several serious challenges in processing, which may have been responsible for the short-term clinical failures observed with Poly 11 during the 1980s. Despite the negative connotations associated with composites from the Poly II experience, researchers have continued to develop innovative techniques to disperse structural and even bioactive fillers in UHMWPE. 

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