Detoxification capabilities of Nand S-containing phytosorbents based on grafted copolymers of wood and lignin for blood serum of patients with various ophthalmic pathologies, including diabetic retinopathy, were determined.Adsorption is the fundamental physical chemical operating principle of the immune system of a living organism. A wide range of sorption materials, carbohydrate, ion-exchange, affinity, immune, etc., is applied with varying efficiency [1,2]. Accumulated experience in their clinical use for hemosorption has shown that mineral sorbents are not selective enough compared with others and absorb from blood useful substances and toxins. However, their versatility, availability, and satisfactory compatibility with blood enabled them to be solidly entrenched in medical practice [3]. If it is considered that hemosorption, in contrast with other methods, including dialysis, can isolate from blood water-and lipid-soluble compounds, bacteria, and viruses, its efficiency can be increased only by creating strictly specific sorbents for particular toxins, the specificity of which is determined not only by the nature of the active functional groups responsible for the extraction but also by the permeability of the matrix for the absorbed substrates.The goal of our work was to investigate the detoxification properties of new ion-exchange phytosorbetns based on grafted copolymers of wood and lignin for blood serum of patients with various ophthalmic pathologies, including diabetic retinopathy. Tables 1 and 2 give the biochemical composition of blood serum before and after contact with the ion exchangers and the synthesis conditions and principal physical chemical characteristics of the phytosorbents.Because bilirubin acts as a weak organic acid at physiological pH values, the use of strongly basic anion-exchange sorbents to extract it is most effective. This enables the macromolecule to be bound specifically by ion exchange. This hypothesis was completely validated using the sorption by an ion exchanger based on lignin that was aminated by vinylpyridine and contained a quaternary pyridine N atom as an example. The degree of absorption reached 86.06%. The bilirubin level in serum was reduced from 14.2 to 1.98 μmol/L.Reducing the basicity of the sorbents decreased their extraction capability. Thus, the completeness of isolation of the desired component decreased to 50.0-24.65% on going from anion exchanger with a quaternized N atom (VP) to ion exchangers enriched with tertiary, secondary, and primary amino groups (PEPA, PEI, TU):where R is the epoxidized biopolymer produced by modification of wood or lignin with DGE [4-6]; W, wood; L, lignin; DGE, diglycidyl ether of dihydroxydiphenylpropane; PEI, polyethyleneimine; PEPA, polyethylenepolyamine; VP-2, vinylpyridine; and TU, thiourea. This shows the efficiency of the electrostatic mechanism of absorption upon sorptive extraction of bilirubin.
