Biomimetic polymers to control cell adhesion

This review describes the application of customized surface modifications using biomimetic polymers to attempt to reduce unspecific protein adsorption to the materials or promote specific cell adhesion to implants or tissue engineering scaffolds. Various polymers that are suited to suppress almost all unspecific protein interactions and underlying mechanisms of cell adhesion are presented and discussed. Suitable modifications to the inert polymers that can later favor the adhesion of specific cell types are also described. These modifications involve utilizing the binding characteristics of peptide sequences to promote specific cell attachment, and techniques to incorporate these sequences into the polymers are explained. Finally, it is shown that biomimetic surface modification techniques are also of tremendous importance for drug delivery with nanoparticles, and the opportunities and limits associated with these approaches are demonstrated.