Nanostructured materials have shown significant potential for biomedical applications that require high loading capacity and controlled release of drugs. Nanoporous gold (np-Au), produced by an alloy corrosion process, is a promising novel material that benefits from compatibility with microfabrication, tunable pore morphology, electrical conductivity, well-established gold-thiol conjugate chemistry, and biocompatibility. While np-Au's non-biological applications are abundant, its performance in the biomedical field is nascent. In this work, we employ a combination of techniques including nanoporous thin film synthesis, quantitative electron microscopy, fluorospectrometry, and electrochemical surface characterization to study loading capacity and molecular release kinetics as a function of film properties and discuss underlying mechanisms. The sub-micron-thick sputter-coated nanoporous gold films provide small-molecule loading capacities up to 1.12 μg cm(-2) and molecular release half-lives between 3.6 hours to 12.8 hours. A systematic set of studies reveals that effective surface area of the np-Au thin films on glass substrates plays the largest role in determining loading capacity. The release kinetics on the other hand depends on a complex interplay of micro- and nano-scale morphological features.

Nanostructured materials with feature sizes in tens of nanometers have enhanced the performance of several technologies, including fuel cells, biosensors, biomedical device coatings, and drug delivery tools. Nanoporous gold (np-Au), produced by a nano-scale self-assembly process, is a relatively new material that exhibits large effective surface area, high electrical conductivity, and catalytic activity. These properties have made np-Au an attractive material to scientific community. Most studies on np-Au employ macro-scale specimens and focus on fundamental science of the material and its catalytic and sensor applications. The macro-scale specimens limit np-Au's potential in miniaturized systems, including biomedical devices. In order to address these issues, we initially describe two different methods to micropattern np-Au thin films on rigid substrates. The first method employs manually-produced stencil masks for creating millimeter-scale np-Au patterns, while the second method uses lift-off photolithography to pattern sub-millimeter-scale patterns. As the np-Au thin films are obtained by sputter-deposition process, they are compatible with conventional microfabrication techniques, thereby amenable to facile integration into microsystems. These systems include electrically-addressable biosensor platforms that benefit from high effective surface area, electrical conductivity, and gold-thiol-based surface bioconjugation. We describe cell culture, immunostaining, and image processing techniques to quantify np-Au's interaction with mammalian cells, which is an important performance parameter for some biosensors. We expect that the techniques illustrated here will assist the integration of np-Au in platforms at various length-scales and in numerous applications, including biosensors, energy storage systems, and catalysts.