| dc.description.abstract | © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Bone is a remarkable living tissue, ensuring the support and protection of the vital organs, providing levers to facilitate locomotion, and acting as a trace mineral reservoir. One of its more extraordinary properties is its ability to respond to its physiological and mechanical environment in order to self-regulate and to repair its mass. Unsurprisingly, the multiple-role, self-regenerative, and regulatory capability of bone tissue has resulted in considerable disparity in the approaches and materials used to replace or repair it, reflecting the fact that this medical problem was initially studied from very different perspectives - as a biomedical engineering challenge aimed at efficiently restoring load-bearing function to the patient and as a requirement to restore structurally or metabolically "normal" tissue capable of physiological and biomechanical responsivity. This chapter describes how the approach taken by medical engineers, clinicians, and biomaterials scientists to the development of synthetic bone graft substitutes has evolved in tandem with a greater understanding of bone's mechanoresponsive nature. Initially, it was believed that a bone graft substitute should be relatively strong, in recognition of bone's supportive and protective roles. However, the requirement for biological interaction and an approach which more fully exploits bone's natural capacity for adaptation and repair has led to the development of more "biomimetic" solutions, which begin to approach the realm of third-generation "smart" biomaterials or medical devices capable of modulating their or the local host response in situ, depending on the precise local environmental conditions. | en_US |
