Calcium phosphate based ceramics have been used in a wide variety of clinical bone repair applications for many decades. Use of these ceramics extends from porous coatings on orthopedic devices to long-term porous scaffolds used for craniofacial surgeries. The primary clinical advantage of calcium phosphate materials are their chemical and morphological similarity to the mineral phase of bone.

There are two key advantages of the combustion synthesis technology. The first one is the low resource and cost effectiveness. Current process of manufacturing calcium phosphate is to bake a batch of bovine or human bones for up to 24 hours at 1200 Degrees. Combustion synthesis allows manufacturing a batch of several kilos within seconds and using extremely low amount of power to ignite the chemical reaction. The second advantage is a capability to manufacture product with consistent characteristics which are tailored to customer specifications.

Our near future goal is to develop novel precursor calcium phosphate components, including solid blocks of synthetic bone which could be shaped immediately before a surgery. The ultimate goal is to create a resorbable synthetic bone with load-bearing characteristics to replace modern metal implants, bone autografts and allografts. Additionally, we are looking into a methodology of intergrading Hewlett-Packard 3D printing technology to build custom bone molds for each patient using their X-rays.