Thermo-triggered ultrafast self-healing of microporous coating for on-demand encapsulation of biomacromolecules

Medical coatings cooperated with biomacromolecules can regulate biological events and tissue responses, thus increasing medical implant longevity and providing improved and/or new therapeutic functions. In particular, medical coatings, which can load the correct species and doses of biomacromolecules according to individual diagnoses, will significantly optimize treatment effects and satisfy the rising clinical need of "precision medicine". Herein, we report on a dynamic microporous coating with an ultrafast self-healing property to fulfill the "load-and-play" concept for "precision medicine". A structure-switchable coating based on poly(ε-caprolactone)-poly(ethylene glycol)-poly(ε-caprolactone) triblock copolymer network is constructed. The coating can be switched to microporous morphology via a water swelling and freeze-drying process. Then, through a mild thermo-trigger as low as 40 °C, this spongy coating can undergo self-healing to switch back to a pore-free structure within minutes to even 5 s. Based on this dynamic coating, we suggest a simple and versatile method to encapsulate biomacromolecules for surface-mediated delivery. The ultrafast self-healing of the microporous structure enables uniform incorporation of biomacromolecules with an easily achieved high loading of albumin of 16.3 μg/cm² within 1 min. More importantly, controllable encapsulation can be realized by simple control of the concentration of the loading solution. We further demonstrate that the encapsulated biomacromolecules retained their bioactivity. This work may benefit clinicians with flexibility to provide personalized medical coatings for individual patients during treatment.