Bone tissue engineering: from bench to bedside

The drive to develop bone grafts for the filling of major gaps in the skeletal structure has led to a major research thrust towards developing biomaterials for bone engineering. Unfortunately, from a clinical perspective, the promise of bone tissue engineering which was so vibrant a decade ago has so far failed to deliver the anticipated results of becoming a routine therapeutic application in reconstructive surgery. Here we describe our bench to bedside concept, the first clinical results and a detailed analysis of long-term bone regeneration studies in preclinical animal models, exploiting methods of micro- and nano analysis of biodegradable composite scaffolds.