High-Porous Composites in the Biopolymer-Calcite System for the Use in Tissue Engineering

摘要

New medical technologies of restoration of damaged bone tissue make use of highly porous scaffold materials whose pores provide the space for biological flows, vascular and nerve ending growth, and the synthesis of new bone tissue. Most promising in this respect are bulk foam structures made of biopolymers [1,2]. The material must be biologically compatible with the body medium and have a biological degradation (resorption) kinetics corresponding to the formation kinetics of the new tissue. It should also be elastic to provide tight adherence to the tissue and complete filling of the defect and be osteoconductive, i.e., able to maintain the vital activity of cells [3, 4]. Intensive studies are aimed at the design of scaffolds from the products of processing of natural biopolymers: gelatin obtained by destruction of collagen or chitosan formed upon chitin deacetylation [5]. The reinforcement of porous scaffolds from a gelatin-chitosan mixture with calcium phosphate nanoparticles imparts the desired properties to the composite materials (CM) thus bringing their structure and composition closer to those of the bone tissue. However, the nanoparticles released from the CM during biological degradation of the polymeric scaffold can cause undesirable complications, in particular, vessel embolism. A grain-shaped filler is more safe.