Nowadays, there are almost limitless applications for microparticles. Microparticles are used as components in many advanced materials and composites, in the healthcare and personal grooming industries, and in many research and development applications. This review presents an overview of recent and current studies carried out at the Particles, Polymers and Biomaterials Technology Group of the ...

The design of novel biomaterials for applications in biological recognition, drug delivery, or diagnostics requires a judicious choice of preparation conditions and methods for the production of well-characterized 3-dimensional structures, preferably by benign processes. In this work, the polymerization of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) methacrylates was examined by kinetic gelation modeling and k...

Abstract A process for the well‐controlled growth of acrylates by Cu‐mediated polymerization has been developed, with macroinitiator synthesized continuously in a copper tubular reactor and subsequently chain‐extended semibatch without additional copper. Extending this to methacrylates styrene, however, proven difficult due significant reduction reaction rate. This barrier overcome chain‐extend...

Surface morphology and chemistry of polymers used as biomaterials, such as tissue engineering scaffolds, have a strong influence on the adhesion and behavior of human mesenchymal stem cells. Here we studied semicrystalline poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) substrate scaffolds, which exhibited a variation of surface morphologies and roughness originating from different spherulitic superstructures. Subs...

Platelet activation by polymer surfaces is thought to require preliminary adsorption of fibrinogen and perhaps changes in fibrinogen conformation. We measured fibrinogen adsorption by a series of polymers by two methods. using either 125l-labeled fibrinogen or 125l-Iabeled antifibrinogen antibodies. and correlated the results with platelet reactivity (retention and secretion) in columns of bead...