Abstract
BackgroundPolymers are attractive materials for both biomedical engineering and cardiovascular applications. Although nano-topography has been found to influence cell behaviour, no established method exists to understand and evaluate the effects of nano-topography on polymer-blood interaction.ResultsWe optimized a micro-fluidic set-up to study the interaction of whole blood with nano-structured polymer surfaces under flow conditions. Micro-fluidic chips were coated with polymethylmethacrylate films and structured by polymer demixing. Surface feature size varied from 40 nm to 400 nm and feature height from 5 nm to 50 nm. Whole blood flow rate through the micro-fluidic channels, platelet adhesion and von Willebrand factor and fibrinogen adsorption onto the structured polymer films were investigated. Whole blood flow rate through the micro-fluidic channels was found to decrease with increasing average surface feature size. Adhesion and spreading of platelets from whole blood and von Willebrand factor adsorption from platelet poor plasma were enhanced on the structured surfaces with larger feature, while fibrinogen adsorption followed the opposite trend.ConclusionWe investigated whole blood behaviour and plasma protein adsorption on nano-structured polymer materials under flow conditions using a micro-fluidic set-up. We speculate that surface nano-topography of polymer films influences primarily plasma protein adsorption, which results in the control of platelet adhesion and thrombus formation.
Highlights
Polymers are attractive materials for both biomedical engineering and cardiovascular applications
The average feature size and height were estimated from both Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) topographical and section images of the film surfaces, and their values represent the distance between the centre of a feature and the centre of a valley between two features
We demonstrated the utility of this device for measuring the blood flow rate through micro-channels coated with nano-structured PMMA films and we related these values to platelet adhesion and protein adsorption analysis performed on the same surfaces
Summary
Polymers are attractive materials for both biomedical engineering and cardiovascular applications. Nano-topography has been found to influence cell behaviour, no established method exists to understand and evaluate the effects of nano-topography on polymer-blood interaction. The techniques available to evaluate the blood compatibility of materials to date are still limited, in spite of the heavy demand for methods allowing the quantitative and accurate characterization of (page number not for citation purposes). Many surface modification techniques [4,5] such as chemical treatment [6,7] or specific molecular immobilization [8,9,10,11] have been explored to control polymer interaction with blood cells and proteins
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