Orthopedic infections can be treated with antibiotic-loaded bone cements. However, due to the growing number of resistances, new formulations are needed to e.g. improve the drug release. For this reason, dual-antibiotic bone cement containing chitosan and chitosan oligosaccharide was prepared in the presented study.

Critical bone defects often require the use of bone grafts or artificial bone substitutes such as calcium phosphate cement (CPC) or magnesium phosphate cement (MPC). In the study presented here, MPC is modified with CMC and sodium alginate to form a novel bone cement and its properties are investigated in vivo and in vitro.

The jear 2013 was an outstanding year for chitosan research, as a new record of publications has been achieved. Throughout the year, 1845 articles about chitosan and chitosan derivatives have been published, which mainly focused on animal and human studies, nanoparticles, pharmaceutical preparations and evaluation studies. The leading scientists in the field of chitosan were Rui L. Reis (University of Minho, Portugal), Shantikumar V. Nair (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University, India) and Andreas Bernkop-Schnürch (University of Innsbruck, Austria).