Abstract
Complement system activated on extracorporeal artificial organs often generates local and systemic impacts on body. In this paper, much emphasis was placed to establish the surface property-complement activation relationship and to define mechanistic aspects of initiation reactions of both classical and alternative pathways on polymers. The general features of the relationship are; 1) The most innert surfaces are hydrophobic and 2) the most potent ones are the polar surfaces with surface hydroxyl groups. The C1 activation in classical pathway was found to be initiated via IgG-dependent and IgG-independent mechanisms, which largely depends on the nature of polymer surfaces. The activation of alternative pathway was found to be greatly enhanced by chemical bonding of surface hydroxyi group with C3 factor. The preliminary study on effector function of activated complement factors to immunocompetent cells (natural killer and macrophage) was reported.
