Polymer Brushes: Novel Surfaces for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Polymer brushes played an important role in surface modification techniques to improve the biocompatibility of modified surfaces inside the human body for different biological and biomedical applications. This modification give the ability to control biointerfacial interactions such as cell attachment, protein adsorption and bacterial biofilm formation. Surface modification with polymer layers can be utilized to alter the surface properties, including biocompatibility, antifouling ability, corrosion resistance and wettability, and it can be achieved by immobilisation or spraying of polymers from solution. Also, it is easy to graft polymers with reactive end groups onto surfaces leading to the formation of polymer brushes at high density, which have specific features, such as chemical robustness, tunable mechanical properties and the flexibility to use polymers of different chemistry or introduction of bifunctional polymers for specific immobilisation of other molecules, especially proteins and enzymes. The specific properties of polymer brushes make them ideal candidates to be used in the biomedical field. For example,