Preparation Method of Nano/Macroporous Bone Tissue Scaffolds for Regenerative Medicine (Technology #: 051306-01)

Lehigh University Office of Technology Transfer
posted on 01/14/2008

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SUMMARY

One of the great challenges of the 21st Century is increasing life expectancy, while at the same time maintaining quality of life in an ageing population. Regenerative medicine is, therefore, a new strategy that is being developed to repair damaged or diseased tissues to their original state or function. By helping natural healing processes to work faster or by using special materials with human cell cultures, scaffolds act as three dimensional templates for cell growth and differentiation and formation of living tissues. Scaffolds containing dual porosity have been claimed to exhibit a better performance in terms of crystallization of hydroxycarbonate apatite.

 

This invention provides a method based on sol-gel processing and polymerization-induced phase separation for preparing a silica-based bioactive scaffold consisting of interconnected pores of hundreds of micrometers and several to tens of nanometers in size. This is optimal for bone regeneration performance and is a cheap and versatile method which leads to structurally stronger materials than ones achieved by other methods.  Lehigh Tech ID# 051306-01. 

 

 

THE MARKET

While tissue scaffold engineering for bone and cartilage repair may not be a new development, there is still an immediate window of opportunity for such technologies. This is due not only to the size of the global bone replacement material market, which is around $2B as of 2010, but also due to the aging baby-boomer population and the need for more innovative and effective bone replacement and grafting techniques.

 

THE OPPORTUNITY

Lehigh University is interested in licensing this technology as well as in identifying funding and co-development opportunities.

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The low-cost and versatile sol-gel process allows the control of composition (e.g. Ca/P molar ratio), texture (pore size and shape), homogeneous oxide materials, and scaffold shape control