Functional polymeric coatings: thiol-maleimide ‘click’ chemistry as a powerful surface functionalization tool

Functional polymeric coatings are instrumental in enabling many of the current device technologies to address challenges in disease diagnostics and their treatment. Thus, facile fabrication of readily functionalizable polymeric coatings is an actively pursued area of research. Over the past several years, our research group has established that the thiol-maleimide-based conjugation strategy provides a highly efficient avenue to obtain functionalizable polymeric coatings. In this feature article, we summarize in a chronological fashion, our efforts in the area of synthesis and application of maleimide-containing polymeric materials and coatings. Hopefully, this feature article provides the researchers with a quick overview of our contributions in the area, and the vast potential of maleimide-group containing polymeric materials to fabricate a variety of readily functionalizable soft interfaces for various biomedical applications.