Functionalisation of porous hydroxyapatite for bone substitutes

Calcium phosphate ceramics such as hydroxyapatite (HA) have been widely used to repair and reconstruct damaged parts of the human skeleton. This material is currently available as injectable cements, granules or macroporous blocks. The most common materials are granules because of their ability to be implanted in the human body. In this study, a new manufacturing procedure to fabricate either dense or microporous or macroporous hydroxyapatite spherical granules based on a lost wax method and leading to beads with a fully controlled porosity was developed. The as-obtained HA granules porous structure was impregnated by gentamicin and lambda phage and the antibiotic and phage releasing kinetics were studied as a function of time and porosity.