Effect of different Ti-6Al-4V surface treatments on osteoblast behaviour

The purpose of the present work was to examine the effect of different Ti–6Al–4V surface treatments on osteoblasts behaviour. Previous work in this laboratory has demonstrated that an ageing treatment reduces metal ion release from this alloy compared to standard passivation procedures. In this study, human osteosarcoma MG-63 were used in short-term in vitro tests to assay for cell viability and cell proliferation at 12, 24 and 72 h while SaOS-2 were used in long-term in vitro tests to assay for osteonectin, osteopontin, osteocalcin gene expression, total protein amount (TP), alkaline phosphatase activity (ALP) and fibronectin production (FN) for 1–4 weeks. Epifluorescence microscopy was used to observe SaOS-2 cell morphology. After 24 h, there was no difference in MG-63 cell viability/proliferation or in SaOS-2 cell morphology between the different surface treatments. For the long-term tests, the aged Ti–6Al–4V induced significantly higher cell proliferation than the control Ti–6Al–4V at 72 h. At week 1, no difference in the osteonectin, osteopontin, and osteocalcin gene expression was found between samples. The peak of ALP activity appeared earlier at week 2 for the control surface compared with the passivated and aged surfaces. The early increase in ALP activity for the control sample could be a compensatory effect of decreased osteoblasts proliferation. There was no difference in the expression of FN for the different surface treatments. Our present results showed that the different surface treatments, which induced different metal ion release kinetics and surface properties, influenced the cell proliferation and ALP activity of osteoblast cells. Aluminium ions release kinetics as well as presence of vanadium ions may play a major role in influencing the osteoblasts behaviour in the present study