Tissue engineering has the potential to revolutionize medical therapies, in the ultimate case being able to grow replacement organs. Different cell types are organized specifically within tissues, thus, materials that can effectively direct specific cell lines spatially in a milieu of other proteins and cell types are required to engineer tissues. The development of materials with cell sorting abilities requires an advanced understanding of cell-surface interactions specific to a particular cell type. Toward the goal of producing a lung tissue model, we investigated the interaction of both fibroblastic MRC5 and epithelial Calu3 cells with a 116 member polymer library. A number of materials were identified that preferentially bound one of the two cell types. Chemometric analysis of the cell-material interactions was conducted using partial least square regression of the surface chemistry with the number of attached cells. Fibroblast cell attachment was successfully predicted by assessing only the surface chemistry of the polymeric materials used in this study. Epithelial cell attachment was also successfully modeled from the polymers' surface chemistry: however, this model did not capture all of the variance within the Calu3 cell attachment dataset, suggesting that this cell line is more responsive to surface properties outside those represented in a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrum. Fibroblasts were found to attach preferentially to moderately hydrophilic, amine functional materials. The improved understanding of the biological-material interactions assessed in this study will underpin further development of engineered lung tissue. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.