Use of Cowry Shells in Dental and Orthopedic Medicine: an Alternate Bone Grafting Procedure

Every year, over one million people in the U. S require bone graft procedures, particularly jaw bone replacement,and other 500,000 patients require dental implants worldwide. Most of these implants are made from titanium based alloy, or alloys made from cobalt and chromium. However, these materials fail due to inflammatory responses, and regular dental replacement surgeries are performed to replace these failed implants. To address this problem, dentists resorted to the use of the patients? own bone. This requires removing one or more bones from the patient?s chin,ramus(the back part of the lower jaw) or more commonly, the ribs. This procedure subjects the patient to double surgical trauma and pain. As a result, there is a need to develop other methods and materials that would properly replace damaged bones around human maxillofacial, reducing the multiple and extended surgical procedures. Material that would properly augment the jaw bones must be highly biocompatible and similar in composition to the latter. The use of cowry shells(an exoskeleton),its extracts(chitosan)and composites(silica-chitosan) to design implants for this purpose was demonstrated clinically.