Invited Paper BI-MoM1
Adventures in Biointerface Engineering Inspired by NESACBio – Combining and Integrating Techniques to Gain Insight into Biointerfaces (and Most Instruments Wins!)

Monday, December 3, 2018, 8:00 am, Room Naupaka Salon 6-7

Control and the ability to elicit specific responses from a biological system lies at the heart of most bioengineering. We want to immobilize proteins on biosensors but ask them to as sensitive as they are in solution or in the body, stimulate cells to assemble into tissues, reconstructing our bodily functions. We want methods that prevent bacteria forming biofilms and better still we would like them to stop bacteria attaching to surfaces full stop. But biology is soft and normally has lots of water associated with it, so how and why would you want to use vacuum based techniques to create coatings or characterise these systems?

This talk will explore how in my group and our collaborators, have tackled the challenges associated with interfacing vacuum deposited plasma polymers with water, proteins, lipids and cells to create a wide number of model systems and devices. At the same time, we have developed methods for chemically characterising these systems in vacuum, integrating XPS and ToF-SIMS with a range of other surface analytical and biological tools to gain insight into the materials we create and their interactions with biological systems.