Sodium Alendronate-doped Diatoms Biosilica for new silica-based biological scaffolds

Nanostructured biosilica extracted from diatoms are extensively exploited in a wide number of applications including photonics, biosensing, and drug delivery.[1] Very recently diatoms biosilica has been investigated as smart multifunctional biomaterial for cell growth.[2] Based on these results, we focused on the in vivo engineering of diatoms frustules with sodium alendronate, an osteoclasts inhibitor and a bone cells proliferation enhancer. The obtained doped frustules could be developed as multifunctional scaffolds able to promote osteoblast cells adhesion and proliferation (Fig. 1). in vivo doped with sodium alendronate (NaAl ).