Surface engineering of cellulose microspheres via amyloid-like protein aggregation for bilirubin removal

Hemoperfusion is one of the most effective blood purification techniques to quickly remove bilirubin from the blood of patients with kidney or liver failure. Although numerous adsorbent materials with high adsorption capacity have been developed, their clinical application are still limited due to poor biocompatibility and biosafety issues. Herein, biocompatible core-shell structured adsorbents with cellulose microspheres (CMs) as the supporting core and phase-transformed lysozyme (PTL) as the functional shell are fabricated for the removal of bilirubin in hemoperfusion. The PTL nanoparticle size gradually increased from 179 nm to 806 nm as the number of coatings increased from 1 to 7. The adsorption of bilirubin onto CM@PTL adsorbents was monolayer adsorption through a chemical process, and the bilirubin adsorption capacity of CM@PTL-5 was 2.33 times that of CMs. The maximum dynamic adsorption capacity and the breakthrough volume were 35.8 mg/g and 107.3 mL, respectively. Moreover, our adsorbents exhibited excellent blood compatibility and cytocompatibility, which have promising applications in the field of hemoperfusion.