Preventing Biofilm Formation and Encrustation on Urinary Implants: (Bio)coatings and Tissue Engineering

AbstractEven though urinary stents and catheters have been commonly applied in medicine for several decades and still are constantly being modified and optimized, their structure and performance still requires further improvement. A major drawback of urinary implants is the deposition of organic and non-organic substances on their surface leading to biofilm formation resulting in encrustations, blockages, and infections. Promising research lines are stent coatings with antibodies, enzymes and various bioactive compounds. We will also discuss the possibility of making urinary implants more “tissue friendly” by designing biomimetic surfaces. Finally, in accordance with the paradigm “repair or regrow” we will touch on tissue engineering approaches to replace artificial urinary implants by those generated in vitro or in vivo from homologous tissue. We summarised modern biological approaches to improve the structure, function and performance of urinary stents. Some have been already applied in urinary stent production whilst others have been tested in the field of vascular stents, such as antibody or biomimetic coating. Bioengineering approaches aiming at the generation of complete analogs of damaged urinary tissue from autologous patient-derived cells represent a more futuristic outlook. Nevertheless, we hope that the rapid development of advanced multidisciplinary research platforms in modern biomedicine will make these approaches feasible in the near future.