Fabrication of porous calcium phosphate cements using gelatin as porogen

Abstract

Porous calcium phosphate cements (CPCs) were fabricated using gelatin granules as the porogen. As the amount of gelatin was increased from 0 to 43 vol%, the porosity notably increased from 3 to 47 vol%, while the compressive strength decreased from 23 to 14 MPa; however, these values are still expected to be reasonably high for applications in bone tissue engineering. In addition, osteoblastic cells grew favorably on the surfaces of the CPCs prepared using gelatin of 11 and 43 vol%, which contained well interconnected pores with a size of several hundreds of microns, indicating excellent biocompatibility of the porous CPC samples produced in this study.