Glass as a biomaterial: strategies for optimising bioactive glasses for clinical applications

Abstract

Bioactive glasses were the first synthetic materials to bond to human body tissue, making them ideal for replacing and regenerating bone. Since their first development over half a century ago, many new bioactive glass compositions have been developed for medicine and dentistry. This paper looks at different design strategies employed over the years as well as aspects of glass structure relevant to optimising bioactive glass performance. Statistical compositional series allowed for getting an overview of various compositions and their properties. Since the improvement of structural analysis techniques, particularly solid-state NMR, we can directly relate several bioactive glass properties to the atomic structure, i.e. the spatial arrangement of atoms. Such detailed understanding of the impact of composition and structure on bioactive glass properties enables us to minimise the number of compositions in preclinical and clinical tests needed to confirm positive tissue responses.