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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2011
Clinical situations that require techniques to fill defects of bone are common in the surgical care of Orthopaedic patients. The options currently available to the surgeon are autograft bone (bone from the same person), allograft bone (bone from a deceased donor), and bone cement. Each of these options has a mix of desirable and undesirable properties, and the choice of one of them necessarily involves some degree of compromise. We have been developing a novel, degradable, polymeric composite biomaterial to function as an alternative to the currently available options. The design goals for this biomaterial are that the material be sterilizable without loss of its mechanical and biological properties, available to the surgeon in the sterile operating field on short notice, moldable such that it can fill irregularly shaped defects, harden over a time span of ten to fifteen minutes, provide the reconstructed skeletal region with mechanical properties of the same order of magnitude as those of the bone it replaces, degrade over a period of weeks to months, be replaced by new bone, and maintain a specified minimum mechanical strength during the period of degradation and new bone growth. In this study we asked two questions. First, would the material maintain a minimum compressive strength greater than 5 Megapascals (MPa) and a minimum compressive modulus greater than 100 MPa over a twelve week period in a simulated body fluid environment? Second, would the material degrade in vivo in a rat proximal tibia model?