The challenge
Infection prevention in medical devices
Medical implants will only be successful if the body does not attempt to reject them.
We have experience designing coatings for medical devices to enhance biocompatibility, hemocompatibility and to minimise foreign body responses.
Our response
Prototyping material coatings
We have been using biological information to create coatings that allow a controlled biological response in materials. Our coatings minimise foreign body responses and infection, whilst ensuring biocompatibility.
This technology is allowing polymeric coatings to be grown from surfaces with fine tuning of coating properties. The polymerisation process used provides us greater control, including controlled molecular weight, significantly reduced polydispersity and highly controlled coating architecture.
The coatings may be applied to a wide variety of inorganic or organic substrates in various forms: mouldings, granules, particles including microparticles, capsules, tubes, fibres, films or membranes.
The materials being modified may also be porous, such as a scaffold, woven or non-woven fabric, a crosslinked hydrogel, and biological membranes, such as living cells.
The results
High quality tailored materials
CSIRO holds the patent and provisional patents in surface modification technology.
This technology allows the user to control the desired density, density gradient and coating thickness of the polymeric coating. Ultimately this allows us to tailor bulk material surface chemistries for enhanced product performance.
This technology is currently being utilised by our partners in SIEF funded projects.