The improvement of the sol-gel processes has provided a new generation of
silica-based ordered mesoporous materials (OMM) for biomedical applications and
bone tissue engineering. These materials, indeed, have been suggested as matrices for
sustained drug release, showing that both small and large molecular drugs can be
entrapped and released from the mesopores through several different processes. Many
emerging biotechnologies can benefit from these OMM-based drug delivery systems.
For instance, bone tissue engineering is a growing area directed towards the design of
materials able to improve the bone regeneration capacity by recovering both its
structure and function. In this area, controlled drug delivery from biocompatible and
bioactive mesoporous materials with sufficient mechanical strength could favor the
cellular growth and bone regeneration. Ordered mesoporous silica (OMS) present a high
drug loading capacity and a controlled sustained release which could be helpful for this
purpose, however their poor bioactive behaviour and mechanical properties drove to the
development of new bioactive systems. On one hand mesoporous bioactive glasses
(MBGs) have been extensively investigated, on the other hand the combination of OMS
and bioactive macroporous scaffolds has been proposed in order to obtain hierarchical
systems for bone substitution.
Keywords: Silica-based materials, mesoporous materials, bone tissue
engineering, drug release, bioactive glasses.
