WEB DESK: Now biomaterials will use for the treatment of bone defect and bone tissue engineering.
Bone is a complex tissue and most of the skeletal injuries are due to blunt trauma including long bone fracture. Fracture can cause serious complications both preoperatively and postoperatively. The method and timing of fracture fixation and its management is still debatable. Traditionally bone fixation is done with the help of metals. Majorly stainless steel, titanium and its alloy.
However, these implants and devices are not biodegradable, increase hospitalization time, vet care cost, chances of infection, long period of healing time and complications. Moreover, due to mismatching between the mechanical properties of natural bone and these implants or devices, the loads and mechanical forces are retained by implants and are not directly transferred to the fractured site. This can cause loosening of the bone implant and unwanted bone resorption.
The gold standard for fracture repair is autologous bone grafting and it has all the necessary characteristics required for bone healing, such as osteoinductivity, osteoconductivity and osteogenicity. However, there are concerns of this approach also, such as; donor site morbidity, limited blood supply, increased bone resorption during healing, surgical, anatomical and structural limitations (Sheikh et al. 2015). Second option is allograft, but there are concerns with this, such as; sterilization, delayed graft incorporation, tissue availability, graft cost, long term graft strength and disease transmission. Another alternate to autograft is xenografts; they have osteoconductive and osteoinductive properties, high availability and low cost. But there are many risks are associated with it such as immunogenicity, tissue rejection and transmission of zoonotic and infectious diseases.
