AVS 50th International Symposium
    Biomaterial Interfaces Wednesday Sessions
       Session BI+SS-WeM

Paper BI+SS-WeM1
Patterned Surfaces using Masking during Plasma Deposition or Pulsed Laser Ablation

Wednesday, November 5, 2003, 8:20 am, Room 307

Session: Cell Interactions with Patterned Surfaces
Presenter: H.J. Griesser, University of South Australia
Authors: H. Thissen, CSIRO Molecular Science, Australia
J.P. Hayes, Industrial Research Institute Swinburne, Australia
P.G. Hartley, CSIRO Molecular Science, Australia
G. Johnson, CSIRO Molecular Science, Australia
E.C. Harvey, Industrial Research Institute Swinburne, Australia
H.J. Griesser, University of South Australia
Correspondent: Click to Email
The patterning of biomaterial surfaces has attracted much recent interest for various fundamental and applied purposes, such as the control of the location and shape of attached anchorage-dependent cells. Patterned surfaces are also of interest for bio-diagnostic arrays, cell culturing and separation, some tissue engineering products, and some biomedical implants. We have used two different approaches for the fabrication of patterned surface chemistries. One approach involves the use of masks during the deposition of thin plasma polymer coatings. The other approach is based on the deposition of multilayer coating structures followed by laser ablation through a mask; the top layer is a non-adhesive coating such as PEG and the laser beam exposes adhesive regions "underneath" by ablating the PEG layer in spatially controlled areas. Cell-adhesive proteins can then adsorb only onto the exposed areas capable of adsorbing proteins. The second approach is very attractive because of its speed and ease of fabrication; ablation of the thin PEG layer using a pulsed 248 nm excimer laser is fast with nanometre thickness control by controlling the number of laser pulses. The patterned surface chemistries and their protein adsorption characteristics were analyzed by several surface analytical techniques and by antibody assay. Cell culture using bovine corneal epithelial cells confirmed that cell attachment is controlled by these surface chemistry patterns. Our work has so far focused on fluoropolymer and Si wafer substrates and the use of plasma polymer interlayers for the covalent anchoring of a cloud point grafted PEG top layer; the use of a plasma polymer interlayer has the advantage of being readily transferable to a variety of substrates both ceramic and polymeric. However, the use of laser patterning is not restricted to those coating structures and can be applied to burn adhesive "holes" into other non-adhesive coatings equally well.