Osteoinductive biomaterials—properties and relevance in bone repair

The need for bone tissue regeneration is continuously expanding due to the improvement of life quality and the consequent increase in life expectancy. Although natural bone grafts have shown excellent clinical successes, their use is associated with some important drawbacks, limited availability being one of the most important. Cell- and growth-factor based tissue engineering provides a promising alternative to natural bone grafts; however, the performance of tissue-engineered constructs often depends on the used carrier. An important challenge in the field of bone regeneration is the development of synthetic bone graft substitutes that are "intelligent" in that they are able to instruct the in vivo environment to form bone. A group of potentially "intelligent" bone graft substitutes are osteoinductive biomaterials. In this paper, background on the phenomenon of osteoinduction and an overview of synthetic biomaterials with osteoinductive potential are given. Furthermore, we elaborate on physicochemical properties of biomaterials that are of influence on their osteoinductive potential. Finally, we discuss the relevance of osteoinductivity of biomaterials in the repair of clinically relevant bone defects.