TOWARDS IMPROVED (BIO)FUNCTIONALIZATION OF POLYMER SURFACES VIA MOLECULAR PLASMA TECHNOLOGY

Diagnostics play a crucial role in efficient healthcare through disease prevention and control. While the gold standard diagnostic solutions are very reliable, they are commonly centralised in hospitals and clinical laboratories and often depending on complex expensive equipment. Hence, this requires trained personnel for operation and leads to a long time-to-result. Pandemics, aging, and a growing population poses new challenges that require a shift in the healthcare system towards personalized and decentralized medicine as well as more continuous health monitoring. This highlights the need for new and improved diagnostic devices for faster and reliable results. Key to accomplish this is through the immobilization of functional biomolecules on surfaces. However, a major challenge using the traditional deposition techniques, is difficult manufacturing process in combination with the loss of surface biofunctionality. In this project we aim to exploit the Molecular Plasma™ technology of MPG for the deposition of uniform layers of different types of (bio)molecules on multiple polymer substrates, enabling a wide variety of applications in the diagnostics field but also in life sciences in general. As a case study, the developed methods will be combined and employed for the functionalization of (i)SIMPLE chips to show the potential of the MPT for implementation in the manufacturing process of diagnostic tools.