Plasma Surface Modification of Patterned Polyurethane Acrylate (PUA) Film for Biomedical Applications

Polyurethane acrylate (PUA) has been introduced to utilize as a mold material for sub-100 nm lithography as it provides advantages of stiffness for nanostructure formation, short curing time, flexibility for large area replication and transparency for relevant biomedical applications. Due to the ability to fabricate nanostructures on PUA, there have been many efforts to mimic extracellular matrix (ECM) using PUA especially in a field of tissue engineering. It has been demonstrated that PUA is useful for investigating the nanoscale-topographical effects on cell behavior in vitro such as cell attachment, spreading on a substrate, proliferation, and stem cell fate with various types of nanostructures. In this study, we have conducted surface modification of PUA films with micro/nanostructures on their surfaces using plasma treatment. In general, it is widely known that the plasma treated surface increases cell attachment as well as adsorption of ECM materials such as fibronectin, collagen and gelatin. Effect of plasma treatment on PUA especially with surface of micro/nanostructures needs to be understood further for its biomedical applications. We have evaluated the modified PUA film as a culture platform using adipose derived stem cells. Then, the behavior of stem cells and the level of adsorbed protein have been analyzed.