As a result, in the last few decades it has been seen an increasing need for the use in many situations of bone grafts, in human medicine, and this has extended into veterinary medicine. Nowadays bone is the second most commonly transplanted tissue, exceeded only by blood (Dinopoulos et al. 2005; Bohner et al., 2010).
Essentially, a bone graft can be classified as bioinert, bioactive, or bioresorbable. A bioinert material has minimal interaction with its surrounding tissue and, usually, a fibrous capsule forms around it. Therefore, the functionality of a bioinert implant depends on tissue integration through the capsule. A bioactive material interacts with the surrounding tissue through modification of its surface. After implantation in the bone, an ion exchange reaction between the bioactive implant and surrounding body fluids results in the formation of a carbonate apatite layer on the implant that is chemically and crystallographically similar to the mineral phase of bone Synthetic Hidroxiapatite (HA) and glass-ceramics are prime examples of bioactive materials. A bioresorbable material starts to resorb after implantation and is slowly replaced by advancing original tissue, such as bone. Tricalcium phosphate (TCP) and calcium sulfate (CS) are common examples of bioresorbable materials (Pezzotti et …show more content…
This type of structure allows the invasion of blood vessels osteoblasts, endothelial cells and cells with regenerative potential locations, with mesenchymal stem cells present in some tissues, and as the supply of nutrients and removal of metabolic products cell, promoting bone invasion and resorption of the biomaterial (Navarro et al., 2013). There is also a threshold at which the increase of pore size is detrimental to bone regeneration with problems in osteointegration and bone contact with biomaterial (Götz Müller et al., 2004). Macroporosity has an important impact on osteogenesis and microporosity is undoubtedly another fundamental factor that one has to take into account in producing synthetic bone grafts. Micropores are pores with sizes less than 10μm. The presence of these micropores and its increasing number causes the increase in the contact surface area. The bone regeneration with these biomaterials, is dependent on the activity of precursor cells anchoring to the surface of the biomaterial in order to differentiate, proliferate and initiate the production of mineralized bone matrix (Yuan et al.,