Bone repair and regeneration with postoperative restoration of original structure and functions is a significant clinical goal in traumatology, orthopaedics and oral and maxillofacial surgery. Bone's self-healing capacity can be compromised in the context of large, critical-size osseous defects and non-union fractures caused by trauma, infection, osteoradionecrosis, ablative oncologic surgery, congenital abnormality, or metabolic bone diseases. These defects and fractures often result in long-term aesthetic deformities and/or functional damages which deeply affect patients’ emotional and physical well-being. To treat these defects and promote bone regeneration, there exists an urgent and ever-increasing demand for ‘off-the-shelf’ and cost-effective biomaterial-based therapies to substitute the ever-increasing number of costly and painful autologous bone grafting procedures. Bone grafting is a surgical intervention to reconstruct a damaged or diseased bone with a new bone from the patient′s own body (autografts) or a deceased donor (allografts), a skeletal material of animal origin (xenografts), or a man-made, synthetic substitute (alloplasts, commonly named biomaterials). These biomaterials have evolved through four different generations as follows: bioinert, dense ceramics, metals, alloys, stainless steels and ultra-high-molecular-weight polymers (1st generation); bioactive, dense or porous ceramics, bioglass and cements, or bioresorbable polymers (2nd generation); bioactive and bioresorbable, porous hybrid materials (3rd generation); biomimetic materials so far limited to a handful of second- and third-generation biomaterials functionalized with soluble, secreted signalling polypeptides (or, growth factors) whose role is to trigger new bone formation (4th generation).
The goal of the ART-BONE project was to develop and evaluate a new class of fourth generation biomaterials for bone repair. To reach this goal, the fellow achieved three different objectives: the fellow designed (objective 1), characterized (objective 2) and evaluated (objective 3) bone-mimetic biomaterials in the form of inorganic-organic composite materials. The fellow has also compared these bone-mimetic biomaterials with traditional biomaterials for bone repair and regeneration.
As a conclusion, this action provides a new mechanistic understanding of the physicochemical processes underlying osteogenesis. Further, this action has had a major impact in the researcher’s career since it allowed him to secure a permanent academic position within less than a year after the end of the action.
