The development of materials for any replacement or regeneration application should be based on the thorough understanding of the structure to be substituted. This is true in many fields, but particularly exigent in substitution and regeneration medicine. The demands upon the material properties largely depend on the site of application and the function it has to restore. Ideally, a replacement material should mimic the living tissue from a mechanical, chemical, biological and functional point of view. Of course this is much easier to write down than to implement in clinical practice....

The biomineralization and biomaterials research communities have not been working side by side in the past few years. To our knowledge, no book has addressed before this topic in such an integrated and looking forward perspective. There is, therefore, a necessity for a book that would address, in an integrated way, topics that go from understanding biomineralization processes of different mineralized tissues (that means: not only bone, tooth, etc.) to the use of that science to engineer new biomimetic processes and materials. In fact, only an understanding of the relevant fundamentals and a...