Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Bioactive Glass as Synthetic
Bone Grafts and Scaffolds
for Tissue Engineering
Julian R. Jones
Department of Materials, Imperial College London, London, UK
12.1 INTRODUCTION
Bioactive glass was invented in 1969 by Larry Hench. Since then,
bioactive glasses have been seen to bond to bone and to degrade safely,
releasing bioactive ions that can stimulate stem cells and bone cells to
produce new bone. However, few products have been released to market
(Chapter 2). Bioactive glass has been lagging behind other bioceramics in
terms of numbers of products and amount of use worldwide. What are
the reasons for this? It is not down to performance:
in vivo
studies show
that bioactive glasses outperform bioactive ceramics such as calcium
phosphates and synthetic hydroxyapatites (Chapter 2). So what has
been the problem?
