Synthesis and Characterization of Nanostructured Calcium Phosphate Matrices for Biomedical and Environmental Applications

Calcium phosphates (CaPs) is a class of material that constitute the inorganic component of hard tissues in vertebrates and they are widely present in nature as vertebrate bones, mammalian teeth, and fish scales or in milk and blood as the principal calcium source. The main application of CaPs is in medicine, where they are used as biomaterials in orthopedics for the regeneration or substitution of bone tissue or as drug delivery systems. However, the high tunability of this material and their excellent properties made CaPs a versatile material that can also be useful in other fields. In this thesis, CaPs were prepared with synthetic methods or extracted by biogenic materials and the obtained materials were characterized for biomedical and “non-conventional” applications such as cosmetics or agriculture. Starting from the biomedical field, CaPs were used as porous scaffold for hard tissue engineering or as drug delivery system. Regarding the innovative and less conventional fields, CaPs were prepared to be an innovative ingredient for sunscreen formulations for the cosmetic field, and a controlled-release fertilizer and thus as a natural phosphorous source for the agriculture field. The results obtained in this Ph.D thesis demonstrated the high tunability of properties and thus the final applications of CaPs. In addition, these results have proved that fish-industries by-products can constitute an interesting sustainable source for the development of high added value CaP-based systems for biomedical, cosmetic and agriculture applications. In the future, the use of these by-products as a source to produce CaPs for several kinds of applications could represent an innovative approach for both economic and environmental point of view.