Faster Biomineralization and Tailored Mechanical Properties of Marine-Resource-Derived Hydroxyapatite Scaffolds with Tunable Interconnected Porous Architecture.

Although hydroxyapatite (HA)-based porous scaffolds have been widely researched in the last three decades, the development of naturally derived biomimetic HA with a tunable elastic modulus and strength together with faster biomineralization properties has not yet been achieved. To address this specific issue, we report here a scalable biogenic synthesis approach to obtain submicron HA powders from cuttlefish bone. The marine-resource-derived HA together with different pore formers can be conventionally sintered to produce physiologically relevant scaffolds with porous architecture. Depending on pore formers, the scaffolds with a range of porosity of up to 51% with a larger range of pore sizes up to 50 μm were fabricated. An empirical relationship between the compression strength and the elastic modulus with fractional porosity was established. A combination of moderate compressive strength (12-15 MPa) with an elastic modulus up to 1.6 GPa was obtained from cuttlefish-bone-derived HA with wheat flour as the pore former. Most importantly, the specific HA scaffold supports the faster nucleation and growth of the biomineralized apatite layer with full coverage within 3 days of incubation in simulated body fluid. More importantly, the marine-species-derived HA supported better adhesion and proliferation of murine osteoblast cells than HA sintered using powders from nonbiogenic resources. The spectrum of physical and biomineralization properties makes cuttlefish-bone-derived porous HA a new generation of implantable biomaterial for potential application in cancellous bone regeneration.