An effective self-powered strategy to endow titanium implant surface with associated activity of anti-biofilm and osteogenesis

Abstract The implant-associated infections will cause implant failure, which bring patient suffering and risk of infection death. Once forming bacteria biofilms on implant, the resistance to antibiotics will increase hundreds of times. However, the recent methods that endow implant with antibacterial activity, are always time-limited, process complicated, unstable, introducing new antibacterial components with side effects and showing little effect on mature bacterial biofilm. Meanwhile, some method may inhibit osteoblasts’ adhesion and suppress osteogenesis. Here, we present a self-powered method of loading and accumulating negative charges on the surface of anodized titanium implant by using a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). The most obvious advantage is that TENG can harvest and transfer mechanical energy from daily human motions to electrical energy for building the stable and long-term effective negatively charged implant surface, which effectively inhibits bacterial adhesion, reduces bacteria number and lowers the live/dead bacteria ratio in forming and mature biofilms. Moreover, the treated implant reveals osteogenesis promotion in MC3T3-E1 cells, without adverse side effects. Our findings provide a promising method for energizing implant with anti-biofilm and osteogenesis promotion activity by self-powered technology in vivo, which may also encourage new design impetus for multi-functional material as implant and for medical devices in future.