Bone is the second most commonly transplanted tissue after blood with 2.2 million transplants performed annually. The current standard for treatment are autografts wherein the patient’s own bone is used to repair the damaged site. This approach offers the optimum chance at tissue regeneration, however, it is often painful and requires a long recovery period. Recently, hybrid polymer biomaterials have emerged as a promising alternative strategy due to their biocompatibility and their resemblance to the nanotopography of natural bone. A subset of these biomaterials—nanofiber shish kebabs (NFSKs)—have been shown to nucleate the growth of polymer crystals that follow a periodic pattern with the period ranging from tens to hundreds of nanometers, analogous to collagen fibrils in natural bone. When mineralized in simulated body fluid, NFSKs were shown to be the first synthetic matrix that facilitated intrafibrillar mineralization similar to that found in collagen fibers of bone. Based on previous results showing that fiber alignment affects fiber mat cell proliferation, these experiments were extended to explore the effects of crystal periodicity on mineral orientation. Mineral orientation in bone is known to have effects on mechanical properties, degradation behavior, and biocompatibility, so greater control of this characteristic is critical for the implementation of NFSKs as an alternative to autografts.
