Bacterial cellulose/hydroxyapatite printed scaffolds for bone engineering

The bone tissue recovery after serious injuries has been a goal of regenerative medicine for more than a decades. So the issue of recovering the acetabular bone deficit has not been resolved. The typical practice of “deficient areas” filling is metal porous augments using, which is a short-term solution to this issue. It should be noted that the use of augments is not entirely justified, since for 5 years and more, bone tissue lysis also occurs due to the inevitable macrophage reaction of the body to friction products (debridement). One of the solutions, competing with auto-and/or alloplastic, is the use of composite biomimetic structures obtained by 3D printing. The paper describes the method of inkjet printing of a composite material based on bacterial cellulose(BC)/hydroxyapatite (HA). Printing inks was obtained by mixing the BC nanoparticles in an aqueous solution of CaCl₂ and Na₂ HPO₄ with different proportions. Drying the resulting structures was carried out by freeze drying. The samples with different architecture were obtained. The samples’ microstructure, functional composition were studied. It was found that obtained composite have homogeneous structure of HA paricle’s spreading among BC matrix.