Macrophage-membrane coated nanowired surfaces for diagnosing and cleansing of infected blood

Extracorporeal devices to cleanse septic blood from infecting bacteria, PAMPs and excess cytokines are based upon the use of hemofiltration membranes or adsorbent surfaces, but the current generation of devices has variable and inconclusive therapeutic efficacy. Nanostructured surfaces are consistently called “promising” to control bacterial adhesion and therewith also classify as potential adsorbent surfaces in extracorporeal blood cleansing. Therefore, we first review the interactions between bacteria and nanostructured surfaces. An easy distinction between nanostructured surfaces can be made on basis of periodic- or random-occurrence of nanostructured features, although often nanostructured surfaces are microstructured due to merging of their nanofeatures. Characterization of nanostructured surfaces is not trivial due to the myriad of different nanoscaled morphologies. Both superhydrophobic and hydrophilic, nanostructured surfaces generally yield low bacterial adhesion as compared with smooth surfaces.
This thesis is based on the hypothesis that nanostructured surfaces will also impact the properties of adsorbed cell membranes due to their small adhesion forces and may therewith yield a highly biomimetic surface. It aims to verify the hypothesis that (bacterially-)activated macrophage membranes with natural recognition abilities for bacteria, pathogen-associated molecular patterns, cytokines and endotoxins, adsorbed to a nanostructured surface can be used as adsorbent surfaces in a microfluidic device for extracorporeal cleansing of blood.