A research team from materials science has developed a method of connecting plastics which enables completely new applications. For example in heart valves, to which hardly any blood adheres.
Heart valves regulate the blood flow, to ensure the body is supplied with enough blood. If they don’t close properly any more, for example due to a heart attack, then artificial heart valves can fulfil the required function. But blood platelets can easily stick to the metal surfaces of conventional heart valves. In order to prevent the formation of blood clots, patients must therefore take medication for life. Certain blood-repellent plastics could offer alternative materials. However, until now they have been too soft to be used as a heart valve.
A research team from the Institute for Materials Science at Kiel University (CAU), in cooperation with the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), Campus Lübeck, has now managed to combine a soft, blood-repellent plastic with a sturdy plastic. The team is convinced it could be used for biomedical implants such as artificial heart valves in future. The research team has presented how they used the simple, purely mechanical procedure to permanently connect non-adhesive plastics for the first time in the journal Nanoscale Horizons.
Complex medical applications often require materials which fulfil very different or even contradictory requirements at the same time. It can therefore often be difficult to combine these materials with each other, such as with so-called low surface energy plastics. Due to their low surface energy, hardly anything sticks to them. Previous chemical bonding methods either chemically alter the material surfaces, or even destroy them - for this reason, they are often not suitable for biomedical applications.