Abstract

Synthetic calcium-phosphate based glasses and glass-ceramics play a crucial role in the development of tissue engineering. These materials have a high biocompatibility with biological analogues, excellent ability to undergo varying degrees of resorbability and due to their non-toxicity and relatively high bioactivity they are commonly used as bone and dental implants. A substantial research effort is devoted to improve synthetic calcium-phosphate materials physico-chemical properties, inter alia tune the degree of crystallinity which is mainly responsible for material solubility. One of the strategies is their doping with metal ions. The results found in the literature show that synthesized CaO-P2O5-Nb2O5 compounds exhibit a good biocompatibility, very low cytotoxicity in respect to calcium-phosphate doped with other metals and additionally can enhance human osteoblast function. Moreover, a really few information on the structure of these materials can be found in the literature. Therefore, the detailed structural investigation by means of spectroscopic studies, i.e. infrared absorption spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy, was realized to shed light on the relationship between structural parameters and dopant contents, preparation technique or sample morphology and porosity. In this work, we show the results obtained for bioactive glass-ceramics with Ca/(P+Nb) molar ratio equal to 1.0 and with relative Nb contents reaching value up to 10 mol% of P ions, prepared by melt-quenching (MQ) and sol-gel (SG) methods.

Authors (2)