Advances in bioglass and glass ceramics for biomedical applications

Abstract

Tissue engineering and advanced biomedical technologies have proved to be potential to improve the quality of human life. During the last four decades, the capability to engineer or repair new functional tissues has been a very effective approach to improve the quality of life of patients. Since its discovery by Hench and co-workers in the 1960s, bioglasses and glass ceramics have attracted considerable attention of many researchers because of their unique properties which can easily be tailored by manipulating its compositions and morphology. Over the years, many questions concerning its interactions with both hard and soft tissues have been answered with a multidisciplinary team of surgeons, scientists and engineers. Many clinical Bioglass® and other similar structures and compositions are being used for bone augmentation and restoration, in orthopaedic, dental and maxillofacial surgery and in general in the field of tissue engineering. They have proved to be efficient and effective, some with outperformance over other bioceramic and metal prostheses. It is our aim in this chapter to present the development of these important biomaterials focusing on the history, synthesis, properties, modern characterisation methods and the current development of nano- and biocomposite materials for clinical applications.