Biswal Dipti, Chirra Hariharasudhan D, Hilt J Zach
Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Kentucky, 177 F. Paul Anderson Tower, Lexington, KY 40506-0046, USA.
Biomed Microdevices. 2008 Apr;10(2):213-9. doi: 10.1007/s10544-007-9127-6.
Hydrogels are widely applied as functional biomaterials in the diagnostic and therapeutic fields. For example, intelligent hydrogels containing ionic groups (pH responsive) and poly(ethylene glycol) have promising applications as pH responsive materials in the biomedical and pharmaceutical fields. For potential use of hydrogels in micro- and nano devices, methods are needed to fabricate structures of various geometries at the micro- and nano scale. In this work, polymerization controlled by microcontact printing (PCmicroCP) is utilized, which is a method that uses microcontact printing to spatially define polymerization zones. Specifically, gold surfaces were modified by a hydrophobic thiol self assembled monolayer via microcontact printing and then a hydrophilic prepolymer solution was applied and only spatially occupied the regions confined by the hydrophobic thiol. Subsequently, polymerization reactions were carried out to create hydrogel microstructures. The patterned hydrogel produced using these methods are highly uniform in size and shape, having potential application in the field of biomedical microdevices.
水凝胶作为功能性生物材料在诊断和治疗领域得到了广泛应用。例如，含有离子基团（pH响应性）和聚乙二醇的智能水凝胶作为pH响应材料在生物医学和制药领域具有广阔的应用前景。为了将水凝胶潜在应用于微纳器件，需要有方法在微纳尺度上制造各种几何形状的结构。在这项工作中，利用了微接触印刷控制聚合（PCmicroCP），这是一种使用微接触印刷在空间上定义聚合区域的方法。具体来说，通过微接触印刷用疏水性硫醇自组装单分子层修饰金表面，然后施加亲水性预聚物溶液，该溶液仅在空间上占据由疏水性硫醇限定的区域。随后，进行聚合反应以创建水凝胶微结构。使用这些方法制备的图案化水凝胶在尺寸和形状上高度均匀，在生物医学微器件领域具有潜在应用。
