Facile and Scalable Fabrication of Regenerated Cellulose Microspheres with High Strength and Porosity as a Potential Matrix for Hemoperfusion

For acquiring an ideal sorbent for hemoperfusion, three crucial problems should be addressed: 1. The gap between the stacked sorbents should be larger than the blood cells, around 600 μm, for a continuous pass-through of blood in a hemoperfusion device. 2. The hemoperfusion device should maintain at least a 190 ml/min flow rate. 3. Specific binding on the sorbents is required to absorb the harmful agent in blood. In this research we developed a low-surfactant emulsification technique to prepare physically crosslinked cellulose microspheres (CMs). The particle size of the CMs could be tuned from 150 μm to 1000 μm. Three dehydration methods also regulated the mechanical properties of the CMs. The perfusion column stacked by physically crosslinked CMs, after being treated by an ethanol bath, could withstand pressure induced by a flow rate of 190 ml/min. The adsorption processes of hydrophobic alkyl carbon chain (C18) modified CMs for bilirubin conformed to the Langmuir isothermal adsorption model, which indicated that the bilirubin adsorption by C18 grafted CMs mainly relied on the interaction between C18 and bilirubin. In summary, a facile, scalable and low-surfactant fabrication strategy was developed to synthesize regenerated cellulose microspheres with high strength and porosity as a promising absorbent for hemoperfusion.