Initial studies involved the development of a novel polymer microarray platform which would provide unsurpassed miniaturisation for polymer screening. This required substantial development and optimisation of several parameters and the best results were achieved by printing polymers dissolved in 1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinone and patterned using a contact microarrayer with solid pins. Microarray platforms were developed that used different substrates. The first one used a gold-coated substrate that quenched non-specifically bound fluorescently-labelled proteins, whereas the second utilised a hydrogel coating that prevented non-specific cellular adhesion. The platform using the gold coated substrate was ideally suited to the high throughput study of the physico-chemical properties of the arrayed polymer libraries, via scanning electron microscopy, FT-IR and TOF-SIMS. These polymer microarray platforms provided high throughput while minimising the amount of both polymers and expensive reagents used. The polymer microarrays were used with both adherent and non-adherent immortalised cell lines. In both cases, polymers could be selected that provided selective cellular immobilisation. Such methodologies were subsequently utilised to identify novel materials that allowed gentle immobilisation of human primary renal tubular epithelial cells and mouse bone marrow dendritic cells. This platform was applied to the identification of polymers with potential applications in stem cell biology. In one project polymers were screened for the selective immobilisation of multipotent mesenchymal stromal cell populations from human bone marrow. Several poly(urethanes) with large soft segments provided unexpectedly high selective adhesion of the stromal population. The second project investigated the use of novel substrates that maintained mouse embryonic stem cell cultures in their undifferentiated phenotype state. Finally, the polymer microarray platform was optimised for the study of protein adhesion.