Lipid extraction enhances bank bone incorporation. An experiment in rabbits.

We implanted frozen allogeneic cancellous bone in rabbit skeletal defects and compared the bone-forming response with that from similar implants that had also been extracted with chloroform/methanol. The donor bone was harvested from a previously implanted titanium chamber that is spontaneously filled with reproducible amounts of cancellous bone. It was processed as frozen bank bone, then transferred to an identical, but empty, chamber in another rabbit. Extraction of lipids before implantation increased the ingrowth of new bone into the transferred bone, as measured by 45Ca and 99mTc-MDP activity. A simple treatment with fat solvents may reduce some of the drawbacks of ordinary bank bone.