1.1   This practice covers the assessment of cellular responses to wear particles and degradation products from implanted materials that may lead to a cascade of biological responses resulting in damage to adjacent and remote tissues. In order to ascertain the role of particles in stimulating such responses, the nature of the responses, and the consequences of the responses, established protocols are needed. This is an emerging, rapidly developing area, and the information gained from standard protocols is necessary to interpret cellular responses to particles and to determine if these correlate with in vivo responses. Since there are many possible and established ways of determining responses, a single standard protocol is not stated. However, well described protocols are needed to compare results from different investigators using the same materials and to compare biological responses for evaluating (ranking) different materials. For laboratories without established protocols, recommendations are given and indicated with an asterisk (*).