“End of fillings in sight”was The Telegraph's headline in a recent article reporting the promotion of natural tooth repair from a team at King's College London (UK). The study found thatwhen a biodegradable collagen sponge soaked in the drug tideglusib (a glycogen synthase kinase-3 inhibitor) was implanted into a tooth cavity, it mobilized resident stem cells in the dental pulp to stimulate the...

Environmental and processing factors affecting the biostability of medical devices made from traditionally "stable" polymers, such as isotactic polypropylene (PP) and ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene (UHMW-PE) , were analyzed and their undesirable degradation was related to performance of typical medical devices. Among the critical phenomena determining the biological performance of UHMW...

OBJECTIVE This article reviews the literature on biomaterials used for bone regeneration. MATERIAL AND METHOD A total of seventeen bibliographic sources were found using the MEDLINE database and to avoid the variability of the search terms the thesaurus Mesh was used. RESULTS These materials act essentially due to their osteoconductive ability, although their osteoinductive capacity is bein...

During the past two decades significant advances have been made in the development of biodegradable polymeric materials for biomedical applications. Degradable polymeric biomaterials are preferred candidates for developing therapeutic devices such as temporary prostheses, three-dimensional porous structures as scaffolds for tissue engineering and as controlled/sustained release drug delivery ve...

At present, strong requirements in orthopaedics are still to be met, both in bone and joint substitution and in the repair and regeneration of bone defects. In this framework, tremendous advances in the biomaterials field have been made in the last 50 years where materials intended for biomedical purposes have evolved through three different generations, namely first generation (bioinert materi...

It has been over 40 years since I started biomaterials research. This article is a short summary of past research in my laboratory.

UNLABELLED Controlling the colonisation of materials by microorganisms is important in a wide range of industries and clinical settings. To date, the underlying mechanisms that govern the interactions of bacteria with material surfaces remain poorly understood, limiting the ab initio design and engineering of biomaterials to control bacterial attachment. Combinatorial approaches involving high-...

Recent developments in additive manufacturing techniques have motivated an increasing number of researchers to study regular porous biomaterials that are based on repeating unit cells. The physical and mechanical properties of such porous biomaterials have therefore received increasing attention during recent years. One of the areas that have revived is analytical study of the mechanical behavi...

A common goal in tissue engineering is to attain the ability to tailor specific cell-scaffold interactions and thereby gain control over cell behavior. The tunable nature of protein-engineered biomaterials enables independent tailoring of a range of biomaterial properties, creating an attractive alternative to synthetic polymeric scaffolds or harvested natural scaffolds. Protein-engineered biom...