Physico-Mechanical and Biological Analysis of Composite Bone Scaffold Developed from Catla catla Fish Scale Derived Hydroxyapatite for Bone Tissue Engineering

The properties of a bone scaffold not only contribute to providing the physico-chemical and mechanical support but also play a vital role to support cell adhesion, proliferation and differentiation. Many a time due to the lack in the desired properties, implanted bone scaffolds fail to effectively integrate with the host tissue. Thus, appropriate selections of the biomaterials are of great significance in the process of bone scaffold development. A novel combination of Catla catla fish scales derived hydroxyapatite (HA) and biocompatible polymer PMMA is considered in this work for the fabrication of bone scaffold. HA concentration is varied from 60 to 80 wt% in the PMMA matrix to investigate its effect on the physico-chemical, mechanical and structural characteristics of the fabricated scaffolds. The acquired results signify that the scaffold with 70 wt% HA content shows optimized properties with 76 +/- 0.6% porosity, 7.98 +/- 0.47 MPa compressive strength, 27.8 +/- 0.3 HD hardness, 186 +/- 7% swelling and 5.5 +/- 0.41% degradation. The obtained results meet the recommended physiological standard to guide bone tissue regeneration. The in vitro bioactivity assessment of the best-optimized scaffold indicates bone-like apatite formation on the surface of the scaffold after 28 days of SBF immersion. The SBF immersed scaffold shows the presence of Ca and P along with traces of sodium (Na) and Magnesium (Mg) with Ca/P ratio of 1.58 which is very close to the theoretical Ca/P ratio of natural bone apatite confirming its bioactive nature. The in vitro cytotoxicity evaluation of the scaffold shows 88.1 +/- 3.2% cell viability making the developed scaffold potentially effective to be used in bone grafting.