Bone Substitutes and the Advancement for Enhancing Bone Healing

Financial support: None. Conflict of interests: None. With an aging population and the development of surgical techniques, there is a growing demand for bone reconstruction in areas of trauma, arthroplasty, and spinal fusion Although autogenous bone grafting may be the best method for stimulating bone repair and regeneration, there are still problems and complications, including morbidity related to bone harvesting and limitation of harvest amount. Allogeneic bone grafts have a limited supply and risk of transmission of infectious diseases. Over the past several decades, the use of bone substitutes, such as calcium phosphate, has increased; however, they have limited indications. Biomedical research has suggested a possibility of stimulating the self-healing mechanism by locally transmitting the external growth factors or stimulating local production through a gene transfer. In this review, we evaluate recent advances, including bone graft, bone substitutes, and tissue engineering.