ABSTRACT
Subbu Venkatraman, Xia Yun, Huang Yingying, Debasish Mondal, and Liu Kerh Lin
One of the earliest successful bioactive coatings was that of a heparin-modiŠed surface of a polymer blood oxygenator component trademarked as Carmeda AfŠnity Blood Oxygenator Trillium AfŠnity NT Blood Oxygenator, which received FDA approval in 1997. This bioactive surface was based on a poly(ethylene oxide)-coupled heparin immobilization on a hollow porous membrane used as part of an oxygenator used in bypass surgery, for instance. Since then, several types of heparin-modiŠed surfaces have been introduced in various devices, including chronic dialysis catheter (Bridges, 2007), stent coatings (Michael et al., 2003), blood oxygenators (Okkema et al., 1991) as well as other components of the adult perfusion circuit. The FDA Web site lists an extensive array of such devices. In our opinion, heparin modiŠcation of surfaces is the most successful coating technology so far for indwelling or implanted medical devices.
