Mechanical Properties of Synthetic Bones Made by Synbone: A Review

Biomechanical engineers and physicists commonly employ biological bone for biomechanics studies, since they are good representations of living bone. Yet, there are challenges to using biological bone, such as cost, degradation, disease, ethics, shipping, sourcing, storage, variability, etc. Therefore, the Synbone® company has developed a series of synthetic bones that have been used by biomechanical investigators to offset some drawbacks of biological bone. There have been a number of published biomechanical reports using these bone surrogates for dental, injury, orthopedic, and other applications. But, there is no prior review paper that has summarized the mechanical properties of these synthetic bones in order to understand their general performance or how well they represent biological bone. Thus, the goal of this article was to survey the English-language literature on the mechanical properties of these synthetic bones. Studies were included if they quantitatively (a) characterized previously unknown values for synthetic bone, (b) validated synthetic versus biological bone, and/or (c) optimized synthetic bone performance by varying geometric or material parameters. This review of data, pros, cons, and future work will hopefully assist biomechanical engineers and physicists that use these synthetic bones as they develop experimental testing regimes and computational models.