Multifunctional Calcium Phosphate Nanostructured Materials and Biomedical Applications

The multifunctional nanostructured materials hold the promise for the applications in future clinical treatment to enhance therapeutic efficacy. In the past several decades, various types of nanostructured materials with multifunctional properties have been developed and investigated for the biomedical applications. Although many achievements have been made, the design and preparation of novel multifunctional nanostructured biomaterials with well-defined structures, sizes and morphologies are still a long-term research direction. Calcium phosphate (CaP) nanostructured biomaterials with high biocompatibility are the ideal candidates for multifunctional nanosystems, and have been studied and applied in many biomedical fields such as bone repair/tissue engineering, drug/gene delivery. Compared with pure CaP materials, CaP based composite nanostructured materials, prepared by adding functional elements, molecules or other materials, have excellent properties and promising applications in hard tissue engineering, drug delivery, magnetic targeting and hyperthermia treatment for cancer, antibacterial, bioimaging, and so on. This review article is not intended to offer a comprehensive review on the research on CaP based multifunctional nanostructured materials and their applications in the biomedical fields, but shall present a brief summary of the recent progress in this exciting and rapidly evolving research field. Keywords: Bioimaging, calcium phosphate, drug delivery, hydroxyapatite, multifunction, nanostructure, tissue engineering.