Objective-In contrast to CD34, vascular endothelial-cadherin (VE-cadherin) is exclusively expressed on the late endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) whereas not on the early or myeloid EPC. Thus, VE-cadherin could be an ideal target surface molecule to capture circulating late EPC. In the present study, we evaluated whether anti-VE-cadherin antibody-coated stents (VE-cad stents) might accelerate endothelial recovery and reduce neointimal formation through the ability of capturing EPC. Methods and Results-The stainless steel stents were coated with rabbit polyclonal anti-human VE-cadherin antibodies and exposed to EPC for 30 minutes in vitro. The number of EPC that adhered to the surface of VE-cad stents was significantly higher than bare metal stents (BMS) in vitro, which was obliterated by pretreatment of VE-cad stent with soluble VE-cadherin proteins. We deployed VE-cad stents and BMS in the rabbit right and left iliac arteries, respectively. At 48 hours after stent deployment in vivo, CD-31-positive endothelial cells adhered to VE-cad stent significantly more than to BMS. At 3 days, scanning electron microscopy showed that over 90% surface of VE-cad stents was covered with endothelial cells, which was significantly different from BMS.

Protein adsorption on a biomaterial surface is of great importance as it usually induces unfavorable biological cascades, with the result that much surface modification research has had to be performed in an effort to prevent this. In this study, we developed surface modification methods for stainless steel, which is a representative metal for biomedical device. The stainless steels were first smoothened to different extents by electropolishing, in order to obtain a rough or smooth surface. On these two kinds of substrates, we introduced epoxide groups to the metal surface by silanization with 3-glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane (GPTS). Then, various polymers such as poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG), poly(tetrahydrofuran glycol) (PTG), poly(propylene glycol) (PPG) and poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) were grafted on the silanized stainless steels. Each surface modification step was confirmed by various analytical methods. Contact angle measurement revealed that the surface hydrophilicity was controllable by polymer grafting. Root-mean-square (RMS) data of atomic force microscopy showed that surface roughness was dramatically changed by electropolishing. Based on these results, the correlation between surface properties and protein adsorption was investigated. In the protein adsorption study, we observed that all of the polymer-grafted stainless steels exhibited lower protein adsorption, when compared with bare stainless steel. Moreover, a hydrophilic and smooth surface was found to be the best of choice for decreasing the protein adsorption.

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