Bioactive fluorescent hybrid microparticles as a stand-alone osteogenic differentiation inducer.

Osteogenic differentiation of stem cells is one of the essential steps in bone regeneration. While supplementing exogenous factors using differentiation media is the established method to differentiate stem cells into osteoblasts on biomaterials, designing biomaterials that can act as a stand-alone differentiation inducer and promote bone regeneration is preferred for clinical translation. In this work, we report dexamethasone-loaded organic-inorganic hybrid microparticles synthesized from an intrinsically fluorescent poly (ester amide) and tertiary bioactive glass (PEA-BG) as a stand-alone osteogenic differentiation inducer.

Poly(ester amide)-Bioactive Glass Hybrid Biomaterials for Bone Regeneration and Biomolecule Delivery.

Designing bioactive materials for repairing or regenerating bone defects is an active area of research and discovery. Despite advances made in sol-gel-derived hybrid biomaterials design, three challenges remain: (i) the choice of biodegradable polymers that can form a homogeneous solution in the presence of water is very limited, (ii) low-temperature (below 50 °C) incorporation of calcium into the inorganic matrix while having molecular-level mixing has proven to be a difficult task, and (iii) incorporation of drug-loaded mesoporous nanoparticles into polymer-bioactive glass hybrid scaffolds has not been achieved. In this study, we developed bioactive biomaterials for bone repair/regeneration from an α-amino acid-derived biodegradable poly(ester amide) (PEA) and a tertiary bioglass (SiO-CaO-PO), where calcium was incorporated into the glass network at ambient temperature.

Bone Repair and Regenerative Biomaterials: Towards Recapitulating the Microenvironment.

Biomaterials and tissue engineering scaffolds play a central role to repair bone defects. Although ceramic derivatives have been historically used to repair bone, hybrid materials have emerged as viable alternatives. The rationale for hybrid bone biomaterials is to recapitulate the native bone composition to which these materials are intended to replace.

Template-assisted extrusion of biopolymer nanofibers under physiological conditions.

Biomedical applications ranging from tissue engineering to drug delivery systems require versatile biomaterials based on the scalable and tunable production of biopolymer nanofibers under physiological conditions. These requirements can be successfully met by a novel extrusion process through nanoporous aluminum oxide templates, which is presented in this study. With this simple method we are able to control the nanofiber diameter by chosing the size of the nanopores and the concentration of the biopolymer feed solution.