The ability to guide and control the surface and interface properties of biomaterials is of great importance for a wide range of phenomena including the absorption and adhesion of proteins, cells and bacteria, amongst others. Surface chemistries that allow to precisely control and modulate biointerfacial interactions are of great interest, e.g. for the development of non-fouling surfaces, antimicrobial surface coatings or substrates that can guide cell adhesion and proliferation. Surface-initiated controlled radical polymerization (SI-CRP) techniques represent a very attractive toolbox to design tuneable and dynamic biomaterials interfaces. SI-CRP results in chain-end tethered assemblies of surface-grafted polymer chains that are commonly referred to as polymer brushes. SI-CRP is attractive for various reasons. First of all, it allows precise control over the thickness, composition and architecture of the polymer brush films. Secondly, being a bottom-up strategy, SI-CRP also allows facile and controlled deposition of thin, conformal polymer coatings on complex, 3D structured substrates. In this presentation, we will present several examples of tuneable and dynamic biomaterials interfaces that capitalize on these special characteristics of SI-CRP. In a first example, it will be shown how surface-grafting of stimuli-sensitive polymers can be used to present polymer brush films in which conformational transitions of the surface attached polymers are used to present or mask bioadhesive cues. In the second example, it will be shown how the “controlled” character of SI-CRP reactions can be used to generate “quasi-diblock” copolymer brushes that can be used as very simple model systems to learn something about 3D cell microenvironments. In the last example, it will be demonstrated how adjusting the grafting density of surface-grafted polymer brushes provides opportunities to generate high-binding capacity biointerfaces that are of interest e.g. for DNA or protein microarrays.

Tunable and dynamic biomaterials interfaces via controlled radical polymerization

251st National Meeting (2016)

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