Chapter 18 - Novel Techniques of Scaffold Fabrication for Bioactive Glasses

Abstract

A scaffold serves as a support for designing a biological substitute that aims to deliver an elevated level of satisfactory performance than the damaged tissue, owing to its superior mechanical and structural properties. As new tissue formation proceeds, the scaffold degrades itself to promote bone growth. Bioactive glass is an ideal scaffold material due to its ability to bind with the host tissue, degrade, and form hydroxyapatite layer. Some of the popular techniques for the preparation of bioactive glass scaffolds include melt quenching and sol-gel method. In addition, mesoporous 3D bioactive glass scaffolds can also be fabricated by various methods such as polyurethane sponge template (PUST) method, one-pot synthesis method for synthesis of magnetic and mesoporous bioactive glass composites (MMBGCs), three-dimensional (3D) printing, and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) template method. New compositions of bioactive glasses (with borate, zinc oxide) have removed the difficulties encountered with traditional glass compositions like low bioactivity and low strength. This chapter will enhance the reader’s knowledge about some of the scaffold synthesis techniques commonly employed in the laboratory for devising a viable tissue emulating scaffold system primed for delivery to the clinic. Topics considered as front-runners in bioactive glass scaffold synthesis techniques—melt quenching, sol-gel synthesis, mesoporous scaffold design, and variants of 3D printing have been given special focus as an acknowledgement of their pivotal role in designing modern bioactive nanostructured scaffolds.