Abstract
An amazing change has occurred in the last 30 yr in our ability to care for children and adults with bone sarcomas. Because of better imaging technology and vast improvements in our systems for treating sarcoma with chemotherapy, we no longer use amputations as our first line of care and now perform limb-sparing surgery for most of our patients. The success of metallic implants is very attractive, and many centers use these technologies (1–14) in the treatment of high-grade tumors involving a joint, but in addition there is a long history in orthopedics of the use of allograft implants (15–42). The latter system is intriguing in many ways and may in fact outlive the metallic implants over time. The aim of this chapter is to review the history of allografting, describe the current state of knowledge, present our series of over 1000 cases and their complications, and then try to establish some rules and approaches to alloimplants of the future.