Herein, we present a novel approach for the fabrication of micropatterned polymeric nanowire arrays that addresses the current need for scalable and customizable polymer nanofabrication. We describe two variations of this approach for the patterning of nanowire arrays on either flat polymeric films or discrete polymeric microstructures and go on to investigate biological applications for the resulting polymeric features. We demonstrate that the micropatterned arrays of densely packed nanowires facilitate rapid, low-waste drug and reagent localization with micron-scale resolution as a result of their high wettability. We also show that micropatterned nanowire arrays provide hierarchical cellular control by simultaneously directing cell shape on the micron scale and influencing focal adhesion formation on the nanoscale. This nanofabrication approach has potential applications in scaffold-based cellular control, biological assay miniaturization, and biomedical microdevice technology.
Keywords: Nanofabrication; bio-MEMS; bioscaffolds; drug loading; nanowires; polycaprolactone.