Surface Modification of Biomedical Patient-Specific Cranial and Maxillofacial Implants to Enhance Biocompatibility and Host Tissue Integration

Cranial defects caused by trauma, diseases, infection, or malignancy, are either repaired naturally or through autologous, allogenic, or xenogeneic implants. These approaches bear numerous shortcomings, which custom cranial implants, 3D printing and novel biomaterials such as polyether ether ketone (PEEK) aim to overcome. PEEK implants are predicted to become a large industry in the future for orthopaedic, facial, and cranial surgeries and prostheses.
Rapid prototyping patient specific cranial implants would increase the surgeon's satisfaction and patient's comfort.
This project is part of a multidisciplinary collaboration with researchers and clinicians from the UK and India. In a previous study, the biocompatibility of PEEK was assessed in comparison with standard tissue culture formats. Data have shown that PEEK is a very promising biomaterial when used for the culture of osteoblast-like cells.
Following on from this work, we propose to surface modify PEEK 3D printing filaments to enhance the material's biocompatibility. Therefore, a variety of surface modification techniques, including high-power lasers will be investigated to identify suitable processing conditions to create desired surface morphologies for enhanced biocompatibility. The biocompatibility of surface-modified PEEK will be tested by investigating the biological response of human mesenchymal stem cells. Cell responses will be evaluated via biochemical assays, histological stains, brightfield and fluorescent imaging as well as diamond-based quantum microscopy using Nitrogen Vacancy defects in diamond.
This multimodal approach will provide a unique data set delivering insight into morphological, structural, chemical, and magnetic properties of samples under study. With the use of reference grid spatially correlated imaging will be performed for intercomparison of imaging modalities.