Hemocompatible materials are needed for internal and extracorporeal biomedical
applications, which should be realizable by reducing protein and thrombocyte
adhesion to such materials. Polyethers have been demonstrated to be highly
efficient in this respect on smooth surfaces. Here, we investigate the
grafting of oligo- and polyglycerols to rough poly(ether imide) membranes as a
polymer relevant to biomedical applications and show the reduction of protein
and thrombocyte adhesion as well as thrombocyte activation. It could be
demonstrated that, by performing surface grafting with oligo- and
polyglycerols of relatively high polydispersity (>1.5) and several reactive
groups for surface anchoring, full surface shielding can be reached, which
leads to reduced protein adsorption of albumin and fibrinogen. In addition,
adherent thrombocytes were not activated. This could be clearly shown by
immunostaining adherent proteins and analyzing the thrombocyte covered area.
The presented work provides an important strategy for the development of
application relevant hemocompatible 3D structured materials