Hydroxyapatite-reinforced Collagen Tissue Engineering Scaffolds

by Robert J. Kane Scaffolds have been fabricated from a wide variety of materials and most have showed some success, either as bone graft substitutes or as tissue engineering scaffolds. However, all current scaffold compositions and architectures suffer from one or more flaws including poor mechanical properties, lack of biological response, non-degradability, or a scaffold architecture not conducive to osteointegration. Biomimetic approaches to scaffold design using the two main components of bone tissue, collagen and hydroxyapatite, resulted in scaffolds with superior biological properties but relatively poor mechanical properties and scaffold architecture. It was hypothesized that by optimizing scaffold composition and architecture, HA-collagen bone tissue engineering scaffolds could provide both an excellent biological response along with improved structural properties. The mechanical properties of freeze-dried HA-collagen scaffolds, the most common type of porous HA-collagen material, were first shown to be increased by the addition of HA reinforcements, but scaffold stiffness still fell far short of the desired