The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) project is the development of a new way to make a special class of chemicals, polyethylene glycols (PEGs). PEGs are neutral, stable, flexible, non-toxic and dissolve easily, and thus they are used in many applications, including pharmaceutical products and other biomedical applications. However, it is difficult to make PEGs with enough purity and consistency for use in more advanced pharmaceutical applications, and for other uses, the right PEG simply cannot be made. This PFI project will develop and commercialize novel ways to synthesize PEGs. The new affordable and highly pure PEGs will generate higher quality and lower prices for drugs using them; similarly, many biomedical and related research projects requiring PEGs will be more affordable and will generate more consistent results.
The proposed project will advance the knowledge needed for the synthesis of highly pure PEGs with affordable prices. Currently, pure PEGs shorter than those with 64 ethylene glycol monomer units can be synthesized, but the methods require multiple expensive reaction workups and chromatography, and the products have limited purity. In addition, pure PEGs longer than 64 ethylene glycol monomer units with acceptable purity cannot be synthesized using any known methods. The technical hurdles that cause these problems of PEG synthesis include the difficulty to separate PEG products and impurities, slow reaction rates, and depolymerization side reactions. The research objective of this project is to gain the knowledge needed to overcome these technical hurdles. The approaches include using solid phase synthesis instead of traditional solution phase synthesis, innovative stepwise synthesis monomers, and automated synthesis using a peptide synthesizer. Using these approaches, the products will be easily isolated without tedious workup and purified without expensive chromatography, the reaction rates will be increased, the depolymerization side reaction will be suppressed, and the process will require minimal labor. It is expected that once detailed knowledge about using these approaches are obtained, pure PEGs with unprecedented high quality and low costs will be conveniently produced.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
