a b s t r a c tBiomaterials surface design is critical for the control of materials and biological system interactions. Being regulated by a layer of molecular dimensions, bioadhesion could be effectively tailored by polymer surface grafting. Basically, this surface modification can be controlled by radical polymerization, which is a useful tool for this purpose. The aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the role of surface characteristics on bioadhesion properties. We place a particular focus on biomaterials functionalized with a brush surface, on presentation of grafting techniques for "grafting to" and "grafting from" strategies and on brush characterization methods. Since atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization are the most frequently used grafting techniques, their main characteristics will be explained. Through the example of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) which is a widely used polymer allowing tuneable cell adhesion, smart surfaces involving PNIPAM will be presented with their main modern applications.

Polyelectrolyte complexes (PECs) based on Alginate and Chitosan were prepared for biomedical application. These two biopolymers are valuable resources for biomedical applications. In the present work, three PECs materials were produced using three different drying techniques: hot air drying, lyophilization and supercritical CO drying. The choice of the drying technique allowed producing different type of structures, with different porosity scale. In order to evaluate their potential as intra-abdominal wound dressings, swelling ability in various media, enzymatic resistance and drug release behavior of the resulting materials was studied. It was shown that the increase of the porosity improved the swelling ability, without altering the resistance of the materials, whereas drug release studies revealed that the majority of the drug was released within the first 24h whatever the drying process.