Biopolymer-Based Coatings: Promising Strategies to Improve the Biocompatibility and Functionality of Materials Used in Biomedical Engineering

It was a physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, who recognized a century ago that God made the bulk; the surface was invented by the devil. And indeed, adjusting the surface properties of materials has kept engineers and chemists busy since-and it still does. In the context of biomedical engineering, the key challenge is ensuring the functionality of an artificial object, which is inserted into the human body-an environment that passively and actively rejects foreign materials. Here, recent advances in this area while focusing on those approaches that employ surface coating strategies with biopolymers are summarized.