Effect of a new titanium coating material (CaTiO₃-aC) prepared by thermal decomposition method on osteoblastic cell response

Titanium and hydroxyapatite (HA) are widely used as biomaterials for dental and medical applications. HA-coated titanium implants have excellent biocompatibility and mechanical properties. However, the adherence of HA film formed on titanium substrate is weak because of the lack of chemical interaction between HA and titanium. A solution to this problem is to form an intermediate film on titanium substrate, which provide excellent adherence to both titanium substrate and HA. We developed a novel biomaterial called calcium titanate-amorphous carbon (CaTiO₃-aC) coating prepared by modified thermal decomposition method. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of CaTiO₃-aC and HA coating (positive control), and Ti (negative control) on osteoblastic (MT3T3-E1) cell responses. An increased cellular proliferation was observed in CaTiO₃-aC coating compared to HA coating. The maximum expressions of ALP activity, Col I and ALP mRNA were higher and achieved in shorter period of time in CaTiO₃-aC coating compared to others. These results demonstrated that CaTiO₃-aC promoted better cell attachment, cellular proliferation, and osteoblastic differentiation compared with HA. In conclusion, we suggested that CaTiO ₃-aC could be considered as an important candidate as a coating material.