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Blood apheresis technologies are crucial during blood donation and toxin removal. Current purification methods such as leukocytapheresis, erythrocytapheresis, thrombocytapheresis and plasmapheresis primarily rely on centrifugation and membrane filtration to separate blood components. Although established and scaled-up, challenges related to the selectivity and long-term impact of these techniques on blood cells and their constituents remain. Shear generated during extraction may stress blood cells leading to cell damage and initiate the complement cascade causing platelet activation or triggering inflammatory responses. Emerging technologies, including microfluidics and selective adsorption present viable alternatives supporting more selective extraction pathways but extensively rely on novel manufacturing or material developments. This review critically assesses recent progress across apheresis technologies relating to advances in surface science and materials engineering to address operating challenges towards selective removal or extraction of blood components in traditional apheresis technologies such as centrifugation and membrane filtration.

Ti

Ti3C2T x MXene is a promising active material for developing fiber-based devices due to its exceptional electrical conductivity and electrochemical capacitance. However, fabricating robust fibers with high MXene content remains challenging due to shortcomings such as low interfacial adhesion between sheets and shrinkage-induced sheet disorientation during processing, leading to diminished physical and electrochemical properties. Here, we demonstrate the fabrication of tough, conductive, and electrochemically active fibers through a sequential bridging strategy involving calcium cation (Ca2+) infiltration of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC)-bridged MXene, cross-linked and dried under tension. The resulting fibers exhibited a record toughness of ∼2.05 MJ m−3 and retained high volumetric capacitance (∼985 F cm−3), attributed to the synergistic CNC bridging, Ca2+ cross-linking, and tension application during fiber drying. These fibers also surpass the conductivity of their unaligned pristine MXene counterpart (∼8347 S cm−1 vs ∼5078 S cm−1), ascribed to the tension-induced improvement in MXene alignment within these fibers, mitigating the undesirable effects of inserting an insulating CNC bridge. We anticipate that improving the toughness and conductivity of sequentially bridged MXene fibers will pave the way for the production of robust multifunctional MXene fibers, allowing their use in practical high-performance applications like wearable electronics and energy storage devices.