Simulated body fluid and the novel bioactive materials derived from it.

Professor Larry Hench first reported that certain glasses are able to spontaneously bond to living bone in 1970. This discovery stimulated research into new kinds of bone-bonding materials. However, there were no guiding principles for this purpose, and many animals were sacrificed in the effort to establish them. The present authors proposed in 1991 that the bone-bonding capacity of a material could be evaluated by examining apatite formation on its surface in an acellular simulated body fluid (SBF), without the need of performing any animal experiments. Various kinds of novel bone-bonding bioactive materials based on Ti metal and its alloys with a number of different functions have been developed using SBF. Some of these have entered clinical use as important bone-repairing materials. Without the method of SBF evaluation, these novel materials would not have been developed.