Promising bioglasses for medical applications

Infectious diseases are one of the most important causes of death in the World. The constant use of antibiotics to treat infections has led to the development of resistant bacterial strains. Therefore, noticeable efforts from different scientific fields have been devoted to solve this problem. In materials science, several metal ions have been studied for their antibacterial properties. Copper (Cu) is one of the most used due to its low toxicity to mammalian cells. The aim of this work is to evaluate the antibacterial effects and the biocompatibility of un-doped calcium phosphate glasses (CPG) and Cu2+-doped (CPG_Cu) ones, which have shown in previous studies interesting degradative, mechanical and optical properties to be used in biophotonic applications.