Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
hierarchy is the organization of these mineralized collagen fibrils,
which are aligned parallel to one another to form mineralized colla-
gen fibers.
The nanoscale organization of the composites resembles that
of HA crystals in mineralized tissue in which the HA crystals also
align their c-axes with the longitudinal axes of the collagen fib-
rils. Such alignment is the most impressive characteristic of bone
minerals. Development of novel self-assembled structures should
therefore improve our understanding of collagen-mediated miner-
alization in other calcified tissues and point the way to the devel-
opment of new functional materials for biomimetic engineering.
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Moreover, these fundamental studies provide the basic theoretical
support for the fabrication of HA/collagen composites and their
application in bone regeneration,
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both of which will be intro-
duced in the nextsections.
37.4 Synthesis and Application of Collagen-Based
Scaffolds in Bone Tissue Regeneration
The principal concept of tissue engineering is to isolate a small
biopsyofspecificcellsfromapatient,toculturethesecellsonascaf-
fold material, and then transplant the cell-engineered scaffold into
the defect site of the patient's body in order to direct new tissue
formation into the scaffold, which will biodegrade over time. So an
ideal bone scaffold should simulate the structure and composition
of natural bone to promote early mineralization and support new
bone formation while at the same time allowing for replacement
by new bone. On the basis of this principle, the nano-HA/collagen-
based composites synthesized by biomimetic strategy show great
promise for bone reconstructive or regenerative surgery because of
their compositionaland structural analogy to natural bone.
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37.4.1
Synthesis of Nano-HA/Collagen-Based Scaffolds
By biomimetic strategy, many researchers have prepared HA-
collagen composites showing great promise in clinical application
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