Biomimetic coating of starch based polymeric foams produced by a calcium silicate based methodology

This work proposes a new methodology to produce bioactive coatings on the surface of starch based or other degradable polymeric biomaterials. A calcium silicate pre-coating is employed as an alternative nucleating agent to the more typical bioactive glasses, for inducing the formation of a calcium-phosphate (Ca-P) layer. The method has the advantage of being able to coat porous 3D architectures to be used on tissue replacement and as tissue engineering scaffolds. By using this treatment, only after 12 hours of SBF immersion, it is already possible to observe the formation of very cohesive apatite-like layers, clearing covering the cell walls of the pores in the porous structures. After 7 days of SBF immersion, the apatite-like layers exhibit a partially amorphous nature approaching that of a bone-like apatite structure. These results are very promising for the development of pre-mineralized bone tissue engineering scaffolds. The present methodology can be used to coat biodegradable polymers in spite of all the correspondent difficulties arising from the continuous pH and surface changes as function of time.