Applications of biomimetic nanocrystalline apatites in drug delivery and tissue engineering

Nanocrystalline apatites constitute the inorganic component of hard tissues in vertebrates, and an increasing effort is devoted to prepare synthetic analogues, so-called "biomimetic", able to precisely reproduce the morphological, chemical and structural features of biological apatite compounds. Both from fundamental and applied viewpoints, an accurate characterization of nanocrystalline apatites, including their unusual surface properties, and a full knowledge of crystallization aspects are essentials to design innovative multifunctional bioactive materials that may then find applications in bone tissue engineering, either as self-supported scaffolds or in the form of coatings and fillers, but also in other very recent domains such as bioimaging and therapeutic delivery applications. In this chapter, we will address these various points and we will also underline how the physico-chemical features of nanocrystalline apatite based biomaterials can be tailored and improved in view of specific therapeutic or diagnosis applications. © 2012 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.