Nowadays, new coatings are necessary to offer safety and comfort to patients. These coatings offer substantial advantages, such as enhanced infection control and shortened procedure times, by emphasizing innovation.
Most hospitals and healthcare institutions need hydrophilic medical device coatings and Hydromer, Inc. can offer such services with the help of their experienced R & D team.
Hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings
In the market, generally, two types of coatings are available:
- Hydrophilic
- Hydrophobic
As they are polar and ionic, hydrophilic molecules can be:
- Biocompatible
- Lubricious
- Resistant to abrasion
- Non-thrombogenic
However, hydrophobic coatings can be nonpolar and often reject moisture.
Through the grafting of polymers into covalent bonds to create surfaces that attract water, hydrophilic coating technologies improve polymeric devices.
This improves lubricity and water retention, significantly reducing the force needed to handle intravascular medical devices during procedures.
By reducing frictional forces by a factor of ten to one hundred, these coatings can minimize damage to blood artery walls, inhibit vasospasm, and facilitate navigation through intricate arterial pathways and difficult lesions that are inaccessible to uncoated devices.
By covalently attaching water-attracting polymers to the surfaces of polymeric devices, hydrophilic coating technologies improve them.
This leads to increased water retention and lubrication, which greatly lowers the force needed to move intravascular medical devices during procedures.
These coatings can decrease frictional forces by 10 to 100 times, thereby minimizing damage to blood vessel walls, preventing vasospasm, and facilitating navigation through intricate vascular pathways and challenging lesions that uncoated devices might struggle to reach.
Nanocoated hydrophilic technologies typically exhibit pull forces between 8 and 12 grams, reducing friction by up to 98 percent compared to uncoated surfaces.
This outstanding low-friction performance decreases tissue damage, improves control, makes a device easier to maneuver through intricate anatomical paths, and makes patients more comfortable.
Furthermore, modern hydrophilic coatings are made with chemistry that is intended to create a strong chemical bond with the substrate, preventing separation or delamination.
The fact that these coatings produce an interface that the immune system is less likely to identify as foreign, thereby lowering the possibility of negative reactions, is another important benefit.
Thus, hydrophilic coatings enabled by nanotechnology are essential for improving the performance of medical equipment.
For devices, surgical tools, and instruments prone to fouling with fluids or tissue debris, hydrophobic coatings offer extended cleanliness and maintenance benefits.
These coatings repel fluids, allowing substances like blood, urine, or tissue sheets to slide off more easily.
These coatings are known as oleophobic coatings. They have fluorocarbon functionality to improve their repulsion of hydrocarbons.
By providing water-repellency, self-cleaning, antifouling, and anticorrosive qualities to a variety of surfaces, hydrophobic coatings dramatically lower the risk of contamination and infection in medical equipment.
Drawing inspiration from the lotus petal, superhydrophobic coatings minimize droplet adherence by achieving strong water repellency with a contact angle of more than 120° and a low sliding angle below 10°.
Nonetheless, a lot of makers of medical devices mix together hydrophobic and superhydrophobic coatings.
While superhydrophobic coatings provide extreme liquid repellency, hydrophobic coatings—when covalently bonded—offer greater durability.
Most manufacturers find these stable hydrophobic coatings more practical and sufficient for their needs.