Future antiviral polymers by plasma processing

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is largely threatening global public health, social stability, and econ-omy. Effort s of the scientific community are turning to this global crisis and should present future pre-ventative measures. With recent trends in polymer science that use plasma to activate and enhance the functionalities of polymer surfaces by surface etching, surface grafting, coating and activation combined with recent advances in understanding polymer-virus interactions at the nanoscale, it is promising to employ advanced plasma processing for smart antiviral applications. This trend article highlights the in-novative and emerging directions and approaches in plasma-based surface engineering to create antiviral polymers. After introducing the unique features of plasma processing of polymers, novel plasma strategies that can be applied to engineer polymers with antiviral properties are presented and critically evaluated. The challenges and future perspectives of exploiting the unique plasma-specific effects to engineer smart polymers with virus-capture, virus-detection, virus-repelling, and/or virus-inactivation functionalities for biomedical applications are analysed and discussed. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )

Automated summary

The global threat of the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the scientific community to explore the use of advanced plasma processing for creating smart antiviral polymers. This innovative approach involves surface engineering of polymers to develop materials with virus-capture, virus-detection, virus-repelling, and virus-inactivation functionalities for biomedical applications.