Topography effects of pure titanium substrates on human osteoblast long-term adhesion

Classically various treatments are applied to increase the roughness of titanium implants and improve their integration in the tissues. Many in vitro studies have been performed to better understand the mechanisms underlying the adhesion of cells on materials. Frequently, the adhesion is related to the attachment of cells during the first hours of contact with the substrate. For several years, our objective has been to develop experimental methods to evaluate the long-term adhesion of human osteoblasts from some hours to several weeks in order to model in vitro a tissue-like interface. This culture model allows for the formation over 21 days of a complex osteoblast/extracellular matrix/material interface. We recently developed a new parameter called adhesion power (AP) to evaluate this long-term adhesion. In this study, our objective is to check its efficiency in discriminating the long-term adhesion of human osteoblasts on pure titanium substrates with seven different surface morphologies obtained by electro-erosion, sandblasting, polishing, acid-etching and machine-tooling. By scanning electron microscopy, we observed that the human osteoblasts did spread more intimately on surface with low roughness amplitude than on rough ones. However, the AP was higher on rough isotropic surfaces obtained by electro-erosion, sandblasting or acid-etching and lower on smoother surfaces obtained by polishing and machine-tooling. We demonstrated that the AP was pertinent for evaluating human osteoblast's long-term adhesion on pure titanium surfaces with various roughness parameters. Its correlation with the order parameter, which describes the organization of the roughness, confirmed once more that human osteoblasts are more sensitive to the organization and morphology of the roughness than to its amplitude.