Multifunctional polyampholyte hydrogels with fouling resistance and protein conjugation capacity.

Materials that are resistant to nonspecific protein adsorption are critical in the biomedical community. Specifically, nonfouling implantable biomaterials are necessary to reduce the undesirable, but natural foreign body response. The focus of this investigation is to demonstrate that polyampholyte hydrogels prepared with equimolar quantities of positively charged [2-(acryloyloxy)ethyl] trimethylammonium chloride (TMA) and negatively charged 2-carboxyethyl acrylate (CAA) monomers are a viable solution to this problem.

Nonfouling hydrogels formed from charged monomer subunits.

A critical challenge in the field of biomaterials is the often undesirable, but immediate, coating of implants with nonspecifically adsorbed proteins upon contact with bodily fluids. Prior research has shown that overall neutral materials containing a homologous arrangement of mixed charges exhibit nonfouling properties. This has been widely demonstrated for zwitterionic materials and more recently for coatings containing an equimolar mixture of positively and negatively charged monomer subunits.