Abstract
Biological creatures with unique surface wettability have long served as a source of inspiration for scientists and engineers. More specifically, materials exhibiting extreme wetting properties, such as superhydrophilic and superhydrophobic surfaces, have attracted considerable attention because of their potential use in various applications, such as self-cleaning fabrics, anti-fog windows, anti-corrosive coatings, drag-reduction systems, and efficient water transportation. In particular, the engineering of surface wettability by manipulating chemical properties and structure opens emerging biomedical applications ranging from high-throughput cell culture platforms to biomedical devices. This review describes design and fabrication methods for artificial extreme wetting surfaces. Next, we introduce some of the newer and emerging biomedical applications using extreme wetting surfaces. Current challenges and future prospects of the surfaces for potential biomedical applications are also addressed.
Highlights
Living species have modified their organs to adapt to their habitat, producing diverse natural extreme wetting surfaces
Human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and rat islet cells (ICs) were cultured on the pDA-patterned surface by the hanging drop method. 3D MSC-spheroids were successfully obtained on the surface and their vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) secretion increased to levels approximately 300% higher than the concentrations achieved by spinner flask culture
We presented an overview of the design and fabrication of bio-inspired surfaces with extreme wetting properties and their applications for biomedical engineering
Summary
Living species have modified their organs to adapt to their habitat, producing diverse natural extreme wetting surfaces. Bio-inspired surfaces with extreme wettability have been extensively used in biomedical applications because their unique wetting property provides engineered cellular microenvironments and cell-substrate interactions, which cannot be achieved using conventional cell and tissue culture platforms [14,15,16,17,18,19]. Despite this high interest of the utilization of extreme wetting surfaces in biomedical applications, only a few reports have been published to understand their prospective roles and applications in the biomedical field [20,21].
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