Electrospun groove shaped fibers with excellent hemocompatibility and highly selective capture of live bacteria from blood

Sepsis is a life-threatening systemic inflammatory response syndrome mainly caused by bacterial infection. Directly capturing live bacteria from blood could effectively avoid the activation of pathogen-associated molecular patterns. Despite the availability of numerous materials capable of capturing bacteria, most of these materials will negatively affect blood cells and thus exhibit poor blood compatibility. Given that bacteria are generally smaller than blood cells, we designed a fiber with a groove, where the groove width is larger than bacteria but smaller than blood cells, and trace amounts of positively charged copolymers are loaded into the grooves. This sophisticated design allows the grooved fibers to capture bacteria efficiently as well as maintain good blood compatibility. In vitro experiments show that bacteria could be trapped inside the groove and the fibers can remove over 98% of bacteria. In rabbits’ bacteremia model, these fibers significantly reduce bacterial concentration and endotoxin level, offering a promising therapeutic approach for the treatment of bacteremia. Groove shaped fiber exhibits excellent blood compatibility in both in vitro and in vivo environments. The developed groove shaped fiber opens a new pathway to design functional materials for extracorporeal blood purification.