Hydration Control of Gel-Adhesion and Muco-Adhesion

Protective mucin gel layers established by epithelial cell surfaces in biology have water contents above 90% and provide a low-shear stress nonadhesive interfacial boundary on epithelial surfaces throughout the body. Adhesion between gels and mucin layers, muco-adhesion, is an important aspect of drug delivery, biocompatibility, and the prevention of damage during insertion, use, and removal of medical devices in contact with moist epithelial surfaces. This manuscript develops a simple mathematical model to suggest that gel-adhesion and muco-adhesion are controlled by dehydration. For a fully swollen gel, the osmotic pressure is balanced by the elastic stress in the polymer gel, and differences in the elastic modulus are used to calculate dehydration stresses. A model based on Winkler contact mechanics gives a closed form expression for the force of adhesion that is dependent on the contact radius and gel thickness, inversely proportional to the mucin layer stiffness, and proportional to the square of the differences in elastic modulus. Submerged contact experiments conducted on Gemini gel interfaces of polyacrylamide aqueous gels showed increasing adhesion with increasing dehydration of the probe. Additionally, experiments conducted against mucinated epithelial cell monolayers found mucin transfer onto the most dehydrated gels and no transfer on swollen gels. The model and experiments reveal that high water content fully swollen gels are not intrinsically muco-adhesive, which is consistent with previous tribological experience showing increased lubricity with increasing water content and mesh size.