Adsorption of plasminogen from human plasma to lysine-containing surfaces

The objective of this work is to develop blood‐contacting surfaces that will dissolve nascent clots that may begin to form on them. Surfaces were prepared consisting of a polyurethane to which a coating reagent was attached covalently by photochemical methods. The coating reagent was a polyacrylamide with lysine and benzophenone (for photochemical attachment) moieties pendant to the chains. It was hypothesized that via the lysine moieties such surfaces would show specific binding affinity for plasminogen, the principal component of the fibrinolytic system in blood. Surfaces of varying lysine content in which the lysine was bound through the α‐amino groups, leaving the ϵ‐amino groups free, were investigated. A control surface in which the lysine was bound through the ϵ‐amino groups was also examined. Advancing water contact angles showed the surfaces to be hydrophilic. Hydrophilicity was found to decrease as the lysine content increased. Adsorption of plasminogen from plasma was studied using radioiodinated plasminogen as a tracer. For the ϵ‐lysine surfaces, adsorption increased with increasing lysine content and reached a value of 1.2 μg/cm2 for the surface with the highest lysine content, that is, in the range expected for a compact monolayer of plasminogen. The control surfaces, which contained either no lysine or lysine in which the ϵ‐amino groups were unavailable, adsorbed very small amounts of plasminogen. Immunoblots were obtained for the proteins eluted from the surfaces after incubation with plasma. For the control surfaces, most of the proteins tested for (some 20 in all) were present. However, for the surface containing the highest concentration of ϵ‐lysine, only plasminogen was detected in a significant amount. It is concluded that the ϵ‐lysine surface adsorbs plasminogen to the exclusion of the other plasma proteins. Studies to examine the fibrinolytic properties of these surfaces will constitute the next phase of this work. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res, 49, 409–414, 2000.