Macromolecular Coatings for Endotracheal Tubes Probed on An Ex Vivo Extubation Setup

Endotracheal intubation is indispensable in modern healthcare but typically entails two complications for the treated patients: biofouling-induced infections and friction-associated damage to the tissue. Coatings on the endotracheal tubes (ETT) may mitigate those problems, but they require a well-defined testing method to assess their functionality. Here, such a testing setup is presented, which allows for conducting ex vivo extubation experiments in a reproducible manner. With this setup, different coating strategies that immobilize porcine gastric mucins on the ETT surface are compared. The results demonstrate that covalent coatings generated from lab-purified mucins outperform the other variants in terms of their ability to decrease tissue damage, prevent lipid adsorption, and reduce cell attachment. With a similar approach as presented here, it should also be possible to evaluate macromolecular coatings generated on other medical tubing systems such as cardiac and urinary catheters and endoscopes.

Automated summary

The study presents a testing setup for evaluating the functionality of coatings on endotracheal tubes. Different coating strategies were compared through ex vivo experiments, and it was found that covalent coatings generated from lab-purified mucins performed the best. This approach can also be applied to evaluate coatings on other medical tubing systems.