Abstract
Our ambition for several years is to appreciate and quantify the long‐term adhesion of cells on materials at times where the interface between cells and substrate becomes more complex, more closed to the cell/matrix/substrate interface existing in vivo. With this objective, we quantified the long‐term adhesion and proliferation of human osteoblasts cultured from 24 h to 21 days on pure titanium, titanium alloy, and stainless‐steel substrates presenting six different surface morphologies and two different roughness amplitude. Hence, we did proceed to the statistical correlation of cell adhesion and cell proliferation on 30 different substrates. Additionally, we described surface topography not only by the roughness amplitude but also by the roughness morphology using new specific parameters. By multiple analysis of variance, we demonstrated that nor material composition nor surface roughness amplitude did influence cell proliferation, whereas a very significant influence of the process used to produce the surface was observed meaning that the main influent factor on cell proliferation was the surface morphology. The long‐term adhesion and proliferation capacity of cells were positively correlated on 23 types of substrates on 30, this positive correlation being statistically asserted on 13 types of substrates on 23. This study is the first demonstration of the existence of a statistical correlation between long‐term adhesion and proliferation capacity of human bone cells on substrates with various chemical composition, surface chemistry, and surface topography. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res 72A: 36–46, 2005