An optimal carrier for bone tissue engineering should be both a controlled release system
and a scaffold. In the former role, the carrier must prevent rapid factor clearance and ideally meter
out the growth factor in a predictable manner, allowing therapeutic doses to stimulate target cells for
the appropriate duration. In the latter role, the material should act as a permissive environment into
which bone cells would be attracted to migrate and begin the process of depositing bone matrix.
Therefore the direct incorporation of growth factor in porous scaffolds should be a desirable goal.
The inclusion of a bioactive ceramic on the scaffold design will confer to the systems a bone
bonding behaviour that will guide bone formation. This work reports the development of composite
chitosan/HA (from algal origin) porous structures produced by means of freeze-drying processing
routes that can be further loaded with a biologically active agent. The developed bioactive 3D
structures (completely from marine origin) have potential application as tissue engineering scaffolds
and drug delivery systems due to their morphological and bioactive properties.(undefined
