Biomedical Applications of Mesoporous Ceramics

Book Preface

The advances in biomedical applications of mesoporous ceramics have been very important in the last decade. A great part of this relevance has been due to the search for multifunctional roles for these well-known materials. To achieve that multifunctionality with already known ceramics, it has been necessary to design new synthetic and/or conformation processes.

The present book is focused on mesoporous ceramics for biomedical applications, so ceramics with porosity ranging from 2 to 50 nm will be deeply studied. The main biomedical application of these mesoporous ceramics is in the field of drug delivery, which does not impede their use as starting material for the fabrication of scaffolds for tissue engineering and, therefore, performing two roles simultaneously.

All ceramics, commonly dense, can be produced with a mesoporous structure following the appropriate synthetic method, which is based on the formation of templates with micelles on which ceramics can be precipitated. For this reason, Chapter 1 of this book will describe biocompatible and bioactive ceramics, which can be obtained with a mesoporous structure following the adequate synthetic path. As an example of this, ordered mesoporous glasses will be fully described, from their synthesis to their applications in biomedicine.

Supramolecular chemistry using surfactants has facilitated the possibility of inducing mesopores to a great variety of bioceramics. Among them, this book will describe templated glasses, also known as ordered mesoporous glasses, hydroxyapatites, and mesoporous silica, but it is also possible to produce many other materials following this route.

The chemistry in confined spaces, which was performed in the 1970s with all the zeolites technology, was the root of a great amount of experimental work. In 1972, Mobil Corporation developed a procedure to transform methanol into gasoline using ZSM-5 (Zeolite Socony Mobil) as catalyst.