Plasma Assisted Functionalization of Surgical Grade Metallic Surfaces

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An important application of plasma technology to biomaterial engineering is the ability to functionalize diverse surfaces for the grafting of specific proteins or molecules. This has great potential for the medical implant community where the surface of biocompatible metals could be functionalized with moieties that could accelerate healing and integration of the medical implants in the body. Our industrial partner, Plasmionique Inc., is a Canadian company with the mission to develop and commercialize plasma based solutions for surface engineering problems and wishes to find solutions that could offer specific plasma based processes applied to this medical implant market sector.The main objective of this project is to use plasma technology to functionalize biocompatible metal surfaces (titanium alloy and stainless steel) with fibronectin, a protein commonly produced by body to accelerate wound healing. To determine if the functionalization was successful as well as identify the stability of the modified metal surface, color marking (with fluorescent tags) is a common technique. Plasmionique does not have the technical or conceptual experience to carry out this task.Hence, the main goal of this six-month Engage project is to capitalize on the expertise of Professor Vetrone and his team on the optical characterization of materials to image the fibronectin functionalized common implantable metal surfaces modified by diverse plasma processes and tagged with color markers. His optical laboratory is equipped with a unique and state-of-the-art multiphoton/near-infrared microscope/hyperspectral imager that will be able to rapidly obtain two-dimensional color images of the modified surfaces. Based on these color maps, the plasma conditions can then be optimized.