Antifouling Poly(ε-Caprolactone) Surfaces For Medical Devices

Medical devices inserted into an organism are suspected to the growth of aggregated bacteria on their surface termed biofilm. Biofilm can sometime resist antimicrobial treatments. Thus, implant-associated infections cannot always be treated in an effective way with antibiotics, and in the majority of cases, the only way to fight the infection is to remove the implant. This event poses a public health problem, being crucial to find new strategies to face this serious issue. A promising approach to prevent biofilm formation on medical devices is preventing the adhesion of bacteria to the surface using a coating that avoids bacterial attachment on surfaces, i.e., an antifouling coating. In this work, we used a fluorinated tripeptide that prevent biofilm formation to coat the biopolymer poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) that is suitable for making biodegradable medical devices. Our results shows that PCL coated with this tripeptide reduced the amount of bacteria by ~50% when compared to bare PCL. This newly developed PCL can be useful for the formation of tracheal stents, as this biodegradable polymer is suitable for long term applications due to its slow degradation rate.