Macromolecular Coatings for Endotracheal Tubes Probed on An Ex Vivo Extubation Setup

Endotracheal intubation is indispensable in modern healthcare but typically entails two complications for the treated patients: biofouling-induced infections and friction-associated damage to the tissue. Coatings on the endotracheal tubes (ETT) may mitigate those problems, but they require a well-defined testing method to assess their functionality. Here, such a testing setup is presented, which allows for conducting ex vivo extubation experiments in a reproducible manner. With this setup, different coating strategies that immobilize porcine gastric mucins on the ETT surface are compared. The results demonstrate that covalent coatings generated from lab-purified mucins outperform the other variants in terms of their ability to decrease tissue damage, prevent lipid adsorption, and reduce cell attachment. With a similar approach as presented here, it should also be possible to evaluate macromolecular coatings generated on other medical tubing systems such as cardiac and urinary catheters and endoscopes.