Guest Editorial: Composites in medicine (Special Issue for the Symposium on Composites in Medicine at ACCM-5)

Abstract

The 5th Asian–Australian Conference on Composite Materials (ACCM-5) was held in Hong Kong on November 27–30, 2006. In parallel with the European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM) series, ACCM series of conferences draw biennially researchers from major countries/territories in Asia and Australia and have been providing a forum for presenting most recent achievements and advances in composite science and technology, and for discussing and identifying key and emerging issues for future pursuits. Leading experts in the composites field from Europe and North America are invited to give plenary or keynote talks in ACCM conferences and research groups in as well as outside Asia and Australia come to participate in the conferences. Like ECCM conferences, it has been a tradition to organise thematic symposia in ACCM conferences. But it was at the ACCM-5 that a thematic symposium on composites for medical applications was firstly held in ACCM conferences. Professor Jang-Kyo Kim, the ACCM-5 Conference Chairman, invited me to organise a biomedical composites symposium in the conference and I was fortunate to have the support of friends who served in the International Scientific Committee (ISC) of our symposium. These ISC members were Serena M. Best of the University of Cambridge, UK; Chong-Pyoung Chung of Seoul National University, Korea; Paul Ducheyne of the University of Pennsylvania, USA; Michael K.A. Khor of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Shi-Pu Li of Wuhan University of Technology, China; Feng-Huei Lin of National Taiwan University, Taiwan; Bruce K. Milthorpe of University of New South Wales, Australia; and Akiyoshi Osaka of Okayama University, Japan. Beginning with the pioneering work by Bonfield et al. in the early 1980s of using hydroxyapatite as the bioactive and reinforcing phase in high density polyethylene to produce a bone analogue for human hard tissue substitution, a variety of bioactive composites consisting of bioceramics and biomedical polymers have been produced and investigated for human tissue repair by various groups around the world. Biological materials in human bodies are natural composites, which have served as templates for the development of tissue-substituting materials. Bioactive composites have advantages over conventional tissue replacement materials such as metals, polymers and ceramics in that their mechanical and biological properties can be tailored to meet specific clinical requirements. Producing bone analogues using polymers as matrices has been extended to producing bioactive composites for tissue replacement or regeneration using metallic or ceramic matrices. The utilisation of bioactivity of bioceramic particles in composites has also led to investigations into producing new materials such as bioactive bone cements and bioactive dental materials. More recently, bioactive ceramic particles have been incorporated into biodegradable polymers to form scaffolds for potential tissue engineering applications. In separate developments over the past few decades, structural bioinert composite materials such as carbon fibre reinforced polyetheretherketone and zirconia/alumina composite have also been investigated for orthopaedic or dental applications. These materials are developed primarily to meet the mechanical requirements for the tissues to be substituted. Undoubtedly, the international biomaterials community has embraced biomedical composites and more and more researchers are M. Wang (&) Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: memwang@hku.hk URL: http://web.hku.hk/*memwang