Mechanical Metamaterials Devices and Surfaces

Treatment of critical-sized bone defects is yet a tremendous unmet clinical need. A key to the treatment success is the development of materials that possess mechanical and biological properties close to those of cortical bone. Bioceramics and bio-glasses offer a close duplication of biochemical properties of bone, but their use to repair bone defects has been restricted to non-load-bearing sites of the skeletal system because of their inferior mechanical properties compared to cortical bone. At QUT, we developed anatomically-shaped brick-wall bioceramic scaffolds that duplicate cortical bone’s mechanical and biological properties.