Lectinhistochemistry Evaluation of Rabbits Tibia Implanted with Macroporous Biphasic Ceramic Implants

Many techniques are used to assess biomaterials implants, always intending to measure osseointegration success and tissue response facing the implanted material. Calcium phosphates are widely used as biomaterial and a major component of bone. Many processing methods have been used to achieve porous materials to allow bone ingrowth with an osteoconductive scaffold for bone. To obtain the macroporous BCP implant it was processed by direct consolidation using the protein-action technique, a globular protein based consolidation with ovalbumin. The samples were sintered at 1250°C for 30 minutes, after sintering samples were cut in 4mm diameter cylinders, with 73% volume of porosity and mean pore size ranging about 100 µm. In the present work the macroporous BCP of HAp:β-TCP is assessed after bone implantation in rabbits tibia by lectinhistochemistry (LHC) technique. Lectins are proteins from non-imune origin which binds with strong specificity carbohydrates, LHC is a technique which mark histologically carbohydrates present in glycoproteins of cells. The macroporous BCP cylindrical samples were implanted in male rabbits tibia to the evaluation of biocompatibility and osseointegration in a period of 2 weeks to 4 weeks. After euthanasia of rabbits, tibia samples from the surgery site were taken and fixed with formalin, decalcified, dehydrated and embedded with paraffin to perform histological slides for both morphological and molecular evaluation. The morphological evaluation were performed on histological slides stained with Haematoxilin and Eosin (HE), while for molecular evaluation LHC was performed on histological slides using the lectins PNA, UEA-1, WGA, sWGA and RCA-1 (Vector Labs). All samples osseointegrated well with the bone and the neoformed bone surrounding the implant took the shape of its surface. The implants also allowed bone ingrowth inside the pores towards the center of implant, characterized by islets of round bone present in the HE stained slides.