Biocompatible Thin Film Coatings Fabricated Using the Electrostatic Self-Assembly Process

摘要

Biomaterials are substances that are produced synthetically or biologically for use in the medical and the other fields. The use of biomaterials to interface with living systems, such as fluids, cells, and tissues of the body, has played an increasingly important role in medicine and pharmaceutics. In particular, the design of biocompatible synthetic surfaces to control the interaction between a living system and an implanted material remains the major theme for biomaterial applications in medicine. The novel and low-cost electrostatic self-assembly (ESA) technique provides an effective approach to incorporate various biomaterials on substrate surfaces, and gives great opportunity to develop unique biocompatible materials with well-controlled interfaces between the living system and the implanted material. This paper presents the design, synthesis, and characterization of multilayer thin films fabricated layer-by-layer by the ESA process using ceramics, polymers and fuctionalized fullerenes as candidate biomaterials. Preliminary tests on such fabricated ESA multilayer films were also conducted, including contact angle surface characterization, and in vitro protein adsorption studies with bovine albumin using Fourier Transform Infrared Reflection-Absorption Spectroscopy (FT-IRAS). The results indicate that the nanocomposite thin films fabricated with biomaterials by ESA processing may have broad potential applications for cell attachment and growth in tissue engineering.