Nanostructured multilayer coatings combining chitosan with bioactive glass nanoparticles.

There is an increasing interest in conceiving biomimetic coatings and films for a variety of biomedical applications. Biodegradable multilayer coatings combining a polycation (chitosan) and an anionic element (bioactive glass nanoparticles) were developed by sequential deposition. Quartz crystal microbalance showed that this methodology may be used to produce tunable and viscoelastic nanostructured multilayers upon increasing the number of layer-by-layer cycles. The hypothesis of this concept, which was also verified in this work, is that such robust coatings, inspired by the ordered and tough brick-and-mortar structure of nacre, could also induce the formation of apatite upon immersion in simulated body fluid with ion concentrations similar to those in human plasma. The proposed method could be also employed in the coatings of substrates with complex geometries, including scaffolds for bone tissue engineering applications, and thus constitutes a new technological solution to improve osteoconductivity of a variety of implants for orthopedic applications.