Rebuilding the main bone and soft tissue damage in the skull after the accident or treatment of brain tumors, blood clots or hemorrhage is a formidable challenge. Worldwide, routine clinical practice is to transplant bones or use plastic or metal implants.
However, the use of bones from the patient's own body faces many difficult practical problems. One is that complications may occur at the site where the bones are obtained, and the other is that it is extremely difficult to carve hard bones to fit the holes in the skull. On the other hand, steel and plastic implants do not conform to the structure of real bones, which may cause infection.
Based on this, researchers from the Swedish research institute developed the BioCer implant. In fact, the development of various types of materials, stimuli and treatment methods in order to obtain different regenerative tissues is an important research direction of regenerative medicine. In terms of promoting bone wound healing, magnetic nano-particle materials were implanted in bone wound methods before, and there was a biocompatible "bone bandage" to enhance the natural healing ability of bones and speed up the repair process.
The BioCer implant is made of a proprietary 3D printed bioceramic material (mainly composed of mineral montmorillonite) and installed on a titanium frame, which is shaped like a hole to be filled.
Once implanted, cells from the bone tissue adjacent to the skull begin to migrate into the bioceramic. They continue to reproduce in it while gradually biodegrading. In the end, bioceramics were completely replaced by actual bones. The titanium frame remains in place.
So far, the technology has been successfully tested on sheep and a human test subject. At the same time, this also emphasizes the need for further research, not only to study molecular processes, but also to conduct other clinical studies. The research results have been published in the PNAS journal.