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Frontispiece published in Advanced Materials

Amphiphilic copolymers for easy and versatile surface-biofunctionalization of materials

Summary: A set of PEGylated styrene maleic acid(anhydride) copolymers with systematically varied molecular architecture for adsorptive surface biofunctionalization of bulk materials —”anchor polymers”— have been developed by researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden (IPF) together with researchers at BASF SE and faCellitate (a venture team at Chemovator GmbH) see Advanced Materials.

Tailored surface properties are key to advanced materials. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden (IPF), together with researchers at BASF SE and faCellitate - a venture team at Chemovator GmbH, have now developed a versatile surface functionalization approach based on styrene-maleic acid “anchor polymers” carrying different bioactive moieties. Anchor polymer coatings can be applied to various different materials without reactive conversion from aqueous solutions in a rapid, well-controlled manner. The approach allows for a very effective, easy and robust customization of materials used in, e.g., stem cell biotechnology, toxicology testing, drug development, and in medical devices. A report in the current issue of Advanced Materials, highlighted with a frontispiece demonstrates the potential of anchor polymer coatings to trigger human vascular endothelial cell and induced pluripotent stem cell fate in culture and to prevent bacterial settlement. The modular platform can be readily expanded to include a very broad range of bioactives and may therefore pave the way to combinatorial high-throughput surface engineering approaches of previously unrealizable complexity.

Contact: Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden (IPF), Institute of Biofunctional Polymer Materials (IBP) Prof. Carsten Werner (werner@ipfdd.de) and Dr. Uwe Freudenberg (freudenberg@ipfdd.de): www.ipfdd.de
faCellitate – a venture team of Chemovator GmbH (the business incubator of BASF) introducing cell-instructive surface coatings for laboratory consumables: www.facellitate.com

 

 

25.11.2021

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