Current concepts for the biological basis of dental implants: foreign body equilibrium and osseointegration dynamics

To understand the biological basis of osseointegration, one has to understand the 2 main sides of the implant-host interaction: tissue and biomaterial characteristics. This article addresses osseous tissue characteristics, and the potential role of soft tissues in the osseointegration of dental implants. Successful integration is driven by an inflammatory process. Protein adsorption is key for tissue integration with biomaterials. Osseointegration dynamics relate to the in vivo lifetime of the implant. Understanding this biology is important; it opens the door to putting aside heuristic methods and replaces them by methods that produce solutions to achieve a specific biological goal.