The world is facing an increasing demand for bone implants due to factors such as an ageing population and a rise in incidents such as trauma, bone tumours, skeletal deformations, and other bone defects that require surgical intervention. Developing successful treatments for bone defects is a significant challenge for orthopaedic surgery and materials science, which is searching for ideal bone-substituting materials. Biodegradable metallic materials are temporary support structures that gradually degrade without harming the organism. In recent years, versatile biodegradable metals have been extensively studied for short-term medical implants. Mg-, Zn-, and Fe-based alloys are the three main groups of biodegradable metallic materials, each with at least one significant drawback.

In addition to mechanical properties, an ideal bone substitute requires a complex bone-mimicking geometrical design that carefully selects pore shape, pore size, and porosity. Casting, sintering, foaming, and chemical vapour deposition, conventional techniques for creating bone substitutes, have difficulty precisely controlling geometry and achieving the appropriate level of mechanical properties. However, the development of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques has opened up new possibilities for fabricating ideal porous metallic biomaterials due to the ability to design them freely. Additionally, specific microstructures created during AM, particularly porosity and the possibility of mixing some nanoparticles during printing, can enable tailoring corrosion properties. This research will demonstrate how the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) process can create biodegradable metallic materials with controlled degradation rates, microstructure, and mechanical properties. The presentation will highlight the latest breakthroughs in manufacturing biodegradable alloys, focusing on Fe-Mn, Zn-Mg, and Mg-based alloys.