P(HEMA) - APPLICATION IN THE TISSUE ENGINEERING OF THE ARTICULAR CARTILAGE
LUCIANA BOSTAN 1*, MARCEL IONEL POPA 1, LILIANA VERESTIUC 2, FLORIN MUNTEANU 2 (1)TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY “GH. ASACHI”, FACULTY OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION, 71 A MANGERON STREET, 700050, IAŞI, ROMANIA
(2)UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND PHARMACY “GR.T. POPA”, FACULTY OF MEDICAL BIOENGINEERING, 9-13, KOGĂLNICEA
The extent of the osteo-articular diseases carried out, in the last decades, to the development of new surgical and prosthetic techniques of treatment. Many studies focused on polymeric materials with the purpose to replace the articular cartilage or to optimize the articular prostheses. Some of this materials allow the regeneration of the articular cartilage: VAP (polyalcohol vinyl), HEMA (hydroxyethyl metacrilate) etc. The choice of these biomaterials is difficult to make because they must to have the same structure and to reproduce the mechanical and physicochemical properties of the biological tissue, in this case, the articular cartilage. The paper presents the experimental results about mechanical properties of poly(HEMA) hydrogels. The influence of a highly hydrophilic monomer AA (acrylic acid), included by co-polymerization into hydrogels structure, on their mechanical properties were analyzed. The results obtained show that poly(HEMA-AA) are promising materials for tissue engineering of cartilage.
