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Abstract
Every year more than 80,000 different types of medical devices enter the US market. Although the use of such medical devices including stents, catheters, dialysis bags, sutures, wound dressings, and extra corporeal circuits (ECC) is inevitable in hospital care, medical challenges such as biocompatibility, infection, and thrombosis limit their application. Hence there is a dire need to develop advance biopolymers that can be used in the fabrication of medical device and tissue engineering applications. In 1992, the free radical nitric oxide received approbation as ‘molecule of the year’ by the journal Science and was the subject of a Nobel Prize. Nitric oxide (NO) is a water-soluble, ubiquitous gas, which influences various biological functions including infection, angiogenesis, inflammation, vasodilation, thrombosis, smooth muscle cell proliferation and migration, wound healing, cardiovascular diseases, nervous system diseases, mammalian cell growth, and tumor formation. Nitric oxide is synthesized endogenously from L-arginine by the enzyme nitric oxide synthase (NOS). The potential role of endogenously released NO in controlling physiological processes has also led to the development of NO-releasing/generating materials that can provide an exogenous supply of NO to be utilized in biomedical applications. In general, the current NOreleasing (NOrel) strategies can be achieved by two mechanisms: (i) NO generating materials (NOgen) that alter the endogenous NO production from physiological NO donors such as S-nitrosothiols (RSNOs) using catalytic metal ions, heat, light, moisture or temperature as stimulants; and (ii) NOrel exogenous NO donor molecules that actively release NO or its redox analogues. The NOgen materials take advantage of several endogenous high and low molecular weight RSNOs, including S-nitroso-albumin (high molecular weight), S-nitroso-cysteine, and S-nitrosoglutathione (both low molecular weight). My dissertation entitled, “Development and Characterization of Nitric Oxide-Releasing Platforms for Biomedical Device and Tissue Engineering Applications" discusses the development of NOrel surfaces and characterization of microbial and mammalian cell response towards them to validate their utility in biomedical and tissue engineering applications.