Porous hydroxyapatite and calcium phosphates

Bone disorders and their associated pathologies are a cause of pain and disability worldwide, and represent a critical clinical problem. Bone tissue replacement and regeneration involves the development of three-dimensional porous scaffolds providing appropriate cells response. In this context, over the last decades extensive research has been devoted to the development of calcium phosphate (CaP) and hydroxyapatite scaffolds, considered as elective for their mimicry with the bone mineral phase. The present chapter describes a variety of porous CaP-based scaffold types obtained by different technologies such as those based on ceramic forming techniques such as replica, direct foaming and 3D printing, suitable to give macroporous sintered constructs and also including innovative approaches preventing the use of high temperature sintering and suitable for specific bony sites such as low-temperature self-hardening, biomorphic transformation, and biomineralization processes, suitable to obtain new-generation bone scaffolds associating high bioactivity, multi-scale porosity and bio-competent mechanical performance.