Cutting Edge Endogenous Promoting and Exogenous Driven Strategies for Bone Regeneration

Abstract

Bone damage leading to bone loss can arise from a wide range of causes, including those intrinsic to individuals such as infections or diseases with metabolic (diabetes), genetic (osteogenesis imperfecta), and/or age-related (osteoporosis) etiology, or extrinsic ones coming from external insults such as trauma or surgery. Although bone tissue has an intrinsic capacity of self-repair, large bone defects often require anabolic treatments targeting bone formation process and/or bone grafts, aiming to restore bone loss. The current bone surrogates used for clinical purposes are autologous, allogeneic, or xenogeneic bone grafts, which although effective imply a number of limitations: the need to remove bone from another location in the case of autologous transplants and the possibility of an immune rejection when using allogeneic or xenogeneic grafts. To overcome these limitations, cutting edge therapies for skeletal regeneration of bone defects are currently under extensive research with promising results; such as those boosting endogenous bone regeneration, by the stimulation of host cells, or the ones driven exogenously with scaffolds, biomolecules, and mesenchymal stem cells as key players of bone healing process.