Elimination of Unreacted Acrylate Double Bonds in the Polymer Networks of Microparticles Synthesized via Flow Lithography

Flow lithography (FL), a versatile technique used to synthesize anisotropic multifunctional microparticles, has attracted substantial interest, given that the resulting particles with complex geometries and multilayered biochemical functionalities can be used in a wide variety of applications. However, after this process, there are double bonds remaining from the cross-linkable groups of monomers. The unreacted cross-linkable groups can affect the particles' biochemical properties. Here, we verify that the microparticles produced by FL contain a significant number of unreacted acrylate double bonds (UADBs), which could cause irreversible biochemical changes in the particle and pernicious effects to biological systems. We also confirm that the particles contain a considerable number of UADBs, regardless of the various synthetic (lithographic) conditions that can be used in a typical FL process. We present an effective way to eliminate a substantial amount of UADBs after synthesis by linking biochemically inert poly(ethylene glycol) based on click chemistry. We verify that eliminating UADBs by using this click chemistry approach can efficiently resolve problems, such as the occurrence of random reactions and the cytotoxicity of UADBs.