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Summary: Mixtures of diethyl glycol dimethyl ether vapors and argon were used to feed RF (13.56 MHz) glow discharges and coat polystyrene substrates with poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO)‐like thin films. Different power input values have been used to obtain coatings with different cell‐adhesive properties. Cell‐culture experiments showed a tight correlation between the adhesion/morphology of cultured cell‐lines and the chemical composition of the coatings; the ability of PEO‐like coatings to discourage or promote cell adhesion could thus easily be related to the power delivered to the plasma. Combined deposition processes of different PEO‐like coatings have been performed, with the method of physical masking, to produce surfaces micro‐patterned with cell‐adhesive tracks alternating with cell‐repulsive domains. The micro‐arrangement of different cell‐adhesive domains enabled the patterning of cell cultures and induced the alignment of cells along predefined directions.

Summary: Micro‐ and nanofabrication methods are essential today in microelectronics, optoelectronics, catalysis, and analytics. Recent advances in biomaterials show that micro‐ and nanofeatures, either at the surface or embedded in materials, can drive specific responses both in in vivo and in vitro biological systems. With such an approach, scientists can understand better, and possibly exploit, biological responses stimulated by properly designed biomedical surfaces. Because of their versatility, plasma treatment, deposition, and etching processes are often part of procedures optimized to create micro‐ and nanofeatures of different shape, size, and position, onto and inside materials. Presented here are recent examples of such processes developed in our group for biomedical applications.