Mustafa Abd El Raouf, Yufeng Zhang, Jordi Caballé-Serrano, Richard J. Miron
Bone grafting materials are routinely utilized in the fields of dental and orthopedic medicine to augment lost or missing bone. While autogenous bone has been considered the gold standard for many years, a variety of alternatives have been proposed including allografts, xenografts and alloplasts to prevent the additional morbidity and limited supply for autografts. Xenografts have frequently been utilized in many countries due to their supporting osteoconductive potential as well as that in many countries, allografts are not permitted.
While typically all collagen and growth factors are removed during the processing of xenografts, recently the development of a natural bone mineral containing atelocollagen type I have been proposed utilizing atelopeptidation and lyophilization technologies modifying the collagen components of bone material within bone structure to non-immunogenic atelocollagen. This relatively novel processing technique does not use heat (thermal) processing when manufacturing which has been shown to negatively impact the natural crystalline micro-structure of hydroxyapatite, causing ceramization and destroying collagen components.
The lyophilization technique, involves the evaporation of water contained in a product by sublimation – a previously frozen material is placed in a vacuum, which turns the ice directly to vapor. This new processing technique for xenografts has been shown to preserve lyophilized collagen with lower humidity making the bone matrix hydrophilic. These bone grafts contain roughly 2% moisture, 65-75% hydroxyapatite, 25-35% atelo-collagen content and up to 0.1% non-collagenous proteins. Here we investigated these novel atelo-collagenized bovine bone mineral (ABBM) bone grafts using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and evaluated their bone regenerative potential in a rat femur animal model.
