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Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is a colloidal production process developed in the early 20th century. Industrial scale EPD for the production of electronic components and phosphorescent screens and in the form of cataphoretic painting has known some success. Despite its limited practical applications, the inherent versatility of EPD has never ceased to fuel research into this technique. One of the major drives of this research was to render the method more environmentally friendly by enabling deposition from aqueous suspensions. One particular route, suggested to circumvent the problems caused by the use of water in EPD, is the use of alternating or pulsed fields. Recently, the use of alternating fields in EPD has been investigated for the deposition of biological matter in the form of cells and molecules. With this new avenue of research opening up and coinciding with a rise in biotechnological processes, one can expect a renewed interest in traditional EPD and fundamental research on the use of pulsed and alternating fields in this technique. Hence, this review attempts to summarize a century's worth of both fundamental and applied research for scientists venturing into the field of EPD.

In this study, we demonstrated that in vitro Candida albicans biofilms grown in the presence of diclofenac showed increased susceptibility to caspofungin. These findings were further confirmed using a catheter-associated biofilm model in rats. C. albicans-inoculated catheters retrieved from rats that were treated with both diclofenac and caspofungin contained significantly fewer biofilm cells and showed no visible biofilms inside the catheter lumens, as documented by scanning electron microscopy, as compared to catheters retrieved from rats receiving only caspofungin or diclofenac. This report indicates that diclofenac could be useful in combination therapy with caspofungin to treat C. albicans biofilm-associated infections.

In the biomedical field, modification of titanium surfaces to improve the osteoinductive and antibacterial behavior is widely investigated. This functionalization can be further ameliorated by providing a porous coating with high loading capacity for bioactive materials and drug delivery carriers at the implant surface. In this work, a new powder metallurgical processing route used to deposit such porous pure titanium coatings on Ti based substrates is presented. The coatings were prepared by electrophoretic deposition (EPD) of TiH2 powder suspensions followed by dehydrogenation and sintering in vacuum. The use of hydrides allowed to lower the sintering temperature below that of the α–β transition of the Ti6Al4V substrate. Measurement of the tensile bond strength confirmed a strong adhesion of the porous coating. Deposition of powders with different grain sizes resulted in porous titanium coatings with varying thickness, pore morphology, and surface roughness. The possibility to extend this coating technique to complex shaped implants is highlighted.

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