Background: Despite previous confirmation of osteoinductive potential of demineralized bone matrix (DBM) by other researchers, there is not yet any evidence of studies showing the osteoinductive activity of DBM products from South Africa tissue banks using both in vitro and animal models. This work evaluated the osteoinductivity of DBM both in vitro and in vivo.
Method: DBM particles from six donors from the Centre for Tissue Engineering and C2C12 were cultured (5x104) in 24-well plates using DMEM/F-12 medium supplemented with 10% FBS. After 24 h medium was replaced with medium containing 1% FBS and 5 mg/ml of DBM particles. Bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2,500 pg/ml) was used as a positive control. After 48 h of incubation, cells were assayed for osteoinductive potentials. In an in vivo study, 27 Wistar rats aged six to eight weeks were divided into three groups and experimentally observed for 7, 14 and 28 days. Implants were explanted according to the duration of the experiment.
Results: Increase in cell growth was observed in C2C12 treated with DBM samples. BMP-2 and DBM samples were found to stimulate alkaline phosphatase activity and ELISA assay. Animal weight increase was observed during the 7, 14 and 28 days. Cartilage regeneration were also observed in the histology results.
Conclusion: BMP-2 played a role in the differentiation of myoblast cells into osteoblasts. DBM products showed different osteoinductive capacity both in vitro and in vivo. Findings were variable and time-dependent. From our results, this study supports the effectiveness of DBM fromdonors aged between 45 to 55 years.