Design and evaluation a kind of functional biomaterial for bone tissue engineering: Selenium/mesoporous bioactive glass nanospheres

Conventional treatments of bone tumor involve removal followed by radiation and chemotherapeutic drugs that may have limitations and cause secondary damage. The development of functional filling biomaterial has led to a new strategy for tumor therapy. In this study, a novel therapeutic ion selenium doped mesoporous bioactive glasses (Se/MBG) nanospheres were successfully synthesized by a facile sol-gel technique using cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) as the template, which had uniform spherical morphology (≈ 400 nm), high surface area (>400 m²/g) and mesopore volume (≈0.30 cm³/g). Results showed that hydroxyapatite formation ability and controllable doxorubicin (DOX) release and distinct degradation of Se/MBG nanospheres depended on the dose of Se⁴⁺. In vitro cell cultures showed that both Se/MBG and DOX-Se/MBG nanospheres had the culture time and dose dependent cytotoxicity to MG63 osteosarcoma cells. But DOX-Se/MBG nanospheres reduced the acute cytotoxicity to MG63 because of the co-operative effect of Se and DOX. Meanwhile, Se/MBG nanospheres were found to have selective cytotoxicity to cancer cells (MG63) and normal cells (MC3T3-E1), indicating that the prepared Se/MBG nanospheres had cell recognition function. These all note that the synthesized Se/MBG nanospheres can be used as a filling biomaterial for the bone tissue engineering.