Plasma treated polyethylene grafted with adhesive molecules for enhanced adhesion and growth of fibroblasts

The cell–material interface plays a crucial role in the interaction of cells with synthetic materials for biomedical use. The application of plasma for tailoring polymer surfaces is of abiding interest and holds a great promise in biomedicine. In this paper, we describe polyethylene (PE) surface tuning by Ar plasma irradiating and subsequent grafting of the chemically active PE surface with adhesive proteins or motives to support cell attachment. These simple modifications resulted in changed polymer surface hydrophilicity, roughness and morphology, which we thoroughly characterized. The effect of our modifications on adhesion and growth was tested in vitro using mouse embryonic fibroblasts (NIH 3T3 cell line). We demonstrate that the plasma treatment of PE had a positive effect on the adhesion, spreading, homogeneity of distribution and moderately on proliferation activity of NIH 3T3 cells. This effect was even more pronounced on PE coated with biomolecules.