Synthesis, Morphology, and Biomedical Applications of Plasma-Based Polymers: Recent Trends and Advances

The achievement of large-scale applications of plasma-based polymers in biomedical sectors does not satisfy the appropriate level although a substantial amount of research is already performed. In this context, further investigations are necessary to design and synthesize plasma polymers for biomedical applications. Among the polymeric materials, plasma-based polymers have attracted substantial attention owing to their numerous advantages like faster processing, lower costs, eco-friendly waste, biocompatibility, and versatility, making them excellent materials for biomedical applications. Further, polymer synthesis using plasma polymerization techniques can avoid the time-consuming conventional multistep synthesis procedure. Plasma polymerization also offers a significant solution to overcome the numerous difficulties in the traditional approach where polymers can be directly attached to the desired surface using a plasma process, without disturbing the growing chain, and, thus, prevent an additional process such as grafting. Nevertheless, the design of appropriate plasma-based synthesis methods, optimization of the plasma process parameters, and exploration of polymer-based biocompatibility approaches are still challenging research areas. Regarding the surface morphological features of these plasma polymers, they possess several characteristics, such as wettability, adhesion capacity, and so on, that are important considerations in biomedical applications. In this review, numerous recent approaches to plasma polymerization methods along with different precursor phases used for such kind of synthesis of polymeric materials are discussed. The morphological aspect of the synthesized plasma polymers connected with biomedical applications is also reported in this review. Finally, promising aspects of plasma polymers for biomedical applications are briefly reported in this work. This review may offer an extensive reference for upcoming perceptions of plasma-based polymers and their applications in biomedical sectors.