Final Report Summary - BIOWATER (Development of new chemical imaging techniques to understand the function of water in biocompatibility, biodegradation and biofouling)
Biowater investigated interactions between water and biomaterials and its influence on processes of biodegradation, biocompatibility and biofouling, using chemical imaging (CI), multivariate data analysis (chemometrics), molecular dynamics and conventional methods for biomaterial characterisation. Novel experimental CI methodologies were developed to characterise interactions between biomaterials and water. These were evaluated for a range of biomaterials, including biopolymers, bone cements, hydrogels and coatings in contact with water. Vibrational spectral features were related to conventional surface measurements, such as contact angle, and interactions between water and biomaterials were monitored over time using Near infrared, Mid infrared and Raman chemical imaging. Novel chemometric methods were developed to: correlate CI data with conventional methods for biomaterial characterization, deal with the large datasets encountered in CI experiments for time series analysis and to enable fusion of CI data from different sources. Theoretical approaches were developed based on molecular dynamics to provide, at the atomic level, information on structures that water adopts in the interface. Using the developed techniques, it was demonstrated that the degree to which protein and cell adhesion occurs on polymeric biomaterials could be predicted based on the interaction between water and the surface. Our results showed that predictive models built with spectra from wetted surfaces performed much better than models built using spectra acquired from dry surfaces, proving that the water-polymer interaction is critically important to the prediction of subsequent protein and cell adhesion behaviour. These results offer new insights into cell-biomaterial behaviour in the framework of the water/biomaterial interface.