Bone implants, tissue-engineered product

To date, PLLA has been the most studied and used medical polymer in a wide range of apphcations, such as in bone fixation (Ueda and Tabata, 2003) (under the product name Fixsorb) and as scaffold implants in tissue engineering for bone (Chan et al., 2007 Schofer et al., 2008 Shim et al., 2010 Cai et al., 2010) cartilage (Ju et al., 2007 Tanaka et al., 2010), tendon (Inui et al., 2010), neural (Hu et al., 2010 Wang et al., 2010), and vascular (Francois et al., 2009) regeneration. 

Gopolymers of PGA and PLA, PLGA, have attracted increasing attention as scaffold materials in bone tissue engineering because their degradation products can be removed by natural metabolic pathways. However, one main concern with the use of these specific polymers is that their degradation products reduce local pH, which in turn induces an inflammatory reaction and damages bone cell health at the implant site [374]. 

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