ABSTRACT
The high prevalence of degenerative or traumatic musculoskeletal diseases is a challenge for the orthopedic surgeon, who has to restore limb or joint functionality. Unfortunately, because of the poor intrinsic regenerative capacity of musculoskeletal tissues, the treatments available in this field consist primarily of surgical replacements of the damaged tissue, namely tissue transplantation and joint prosthesis, with several drawbacks, such as donor site scarcity, harvesting costs and post-operative morbidity; moreover, cadaveric transplantation may be responsible for disease transmission, risk of infections, and immunological rejections of the host to the cadaveric graft. To address these shortcomings, tissue engineering research has emerged as an alternative potential solution to tissue transplantation and grafting. In the past 50 years, the evolution of biomaterials in the orthopedic field has led to the introduction of a new class of intelligent engineering
Maurilio Marcacci, Giuseppe Filardo, Giulia Venieri, Lorenzo Milani, and Elizaveta Kon II Clinic-Biomechanics Laboratory, Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute, Bologna, Italy
products, which, besides being necessarily biocompatible, are also smart, biomimetic, and biodegradable. This chapter has been written with the purpose of briefly illustrating the clinical use of these smart biomimetic biomaterials, thus giving the reader an overview of the main areas of their application in the orthopedic field.
