Development of Smart Surfaces for Medicine and Biotechnology: Advances in Glass Functionalization through RDRP Techniques.

All glass represents a material with extremely high utility potential in the development of biomaterials and research tools. Due to a number of its unique properties, such as chemical inertness, thermal stability, and transparency, it can be used in the preparation of hybrid materials for medicine and biotechnology. Such materials can be obtained by grafting polymer brushes from glass surface by reversible deactivation radical polymerization (RDRP) techniques. This paper provides a literature review of the foregoing advances in the development of glass surface modification concepts using atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerization (RAFT). These methods are particularly attractive in designing smart coatings because they enable the synthesis of polymers with a well-defined structure and low dispersity. The resulting materials can then serve as antimicrobial surfaces, tools for selective manipulation of cells, and intelligent platforms for creating cell sheets in tissue engineering. Therefore, the idea of glass modification using RDRP techniques appears to be a promising concept for the future in the development of smart materials for various applications.