Update: 02/08/2024

I have so far not used the money at all. This is because I was waiting to collate this with another money stream from my own current project + one another to create a position PhD position. This is now going through and the PhD student will hopefully start in August.

In the meantime we have done a multitude of things:
I have been experimenting with poly-electrolyte coatings for this application. Polyelectrolytes can be used in a layer-by-layer fashion to coat the underlying membrane/support material. My aim here was to use a very thin coating (which can be precisely controlled) whist having the terminal coating layer negatively charged. For this I surface treated the surface with piranha which made the surface negative, then coated with PDADMAC which is a positively charged PE after this I coated with PSS, which is negative. The first results are very promising for charge and size selectivity. I conducted this work in TUD with the help of my bachelor student Maya Roepke and Dr Bijoy Bera.

So in principle we now know that the coatings can work. The potential PhD student (Tadeo Alcerreca) we will likely be recruiting with the donation for ACX has been also working on the PE coatings but also underlying membrane design for his master thesis. He has been doing this in TU Twente under the supervision of Dr Jeroen Vollenbroek. He will continue on this work but do it concurrently with the blood-compatibility testing and tuning also.

Because it is one thing to develop a membrane that is selective and permeable and another thing entirely to make it compatible with blood as well as low fouling (I have talked in more detail about this on my substack). I am currently setting up the pipeline to do flow-through blood experiments to test out coatings in-vitro. I have already done some static test-tube experiments which gave promising results, but it is best to move to the hydrodynamic conditions we will get in the artificial kidney as quickly as possible. I will soon finalise this and share the testing set-up and some of the preliminary work so far.