Antibacterial surfaces are a huge concern for many applications and uses. To solve this, chemical coatings with limited lifetime are often used to inhibit bacterial attachment, like E.Coli and S.Aurus, bacteria commonly found in hospitals.Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) affect 1 patient out of 217 in Canada [1], cost up to 15 billion $US every year in the US and Europe, and caused 250,000 deaths in 2020[2]. Many works [3][4][5] highlighted the potential of laser textured surfaces to reduce bacterial adhesion. This passive approach consists in femtosecond laser-induced submicron structures such as Laser Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS), which can be smaller than the bacteria size. Through this novel approach, it has been demonstrated that bacterial attachment and thus biofilm formation can be significantly reduced. On the other hand, superhydrophobic surfaces could be mimicked by laser texturing of macrostructures, offering antibiofouling behavior to the treated surface.

Many laser parameters could be tweaked to tailor structures sizes and morphologies, offering mixtures of structures for multifunctional surfaces. In this work, different strategies to obtain biofouling and antibacterial laser textured surfaces for medical applications shall be presented.

[1]https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications/science-research-data/healthcare-associated-infection-rates-canadian-hospitals-infographic.html

[2] World Health Organization. Report on the Burden of Endemic Health Care-Associated Infection Worldwide. 2011

[3] Peter, Alexander, et al. "Direct laser interference patterning of stainless steel by ultrashort pulses for antibacterial surfaces." (2020)

[4] Romoli, Luca, et al. "Influence of ns laser texturing of AISI 316L surfaces for reducing bacterial adhesion." (2020)

[5] Lutey, A.H.A., Gemini, L., Romoli, L. et al. Towards Laser-Textured Antibacterial Surfaces.(2018).