This project by C. Adrian Figg will make nanoscale 'containers' to be used for drug delivery and for 'smart' materials that can sense environmental changes and release their cargo. Biology isolates most chemical reactions into compartments to separate incompatible materials. Almost every reaction needed to sustain life occurs through micro- or nanoscale compartmentalization, including the conversion of food into energy, the fighting of certain diseases, and procreation. Nature has a complicated, but efficient, route towards creating these containers, such as red blood cell creation. In comparison, synthetic chemistry is significantly limited and still in its infancy when being used to create smart materials to fight disease. This project will study ways to encapsulate and compartmentalize biomolecules using differences in polymer compatibility to improve the efficiency of drug delivery, lower a drug's toxicity to healthy cells, and generally improve the smart characteristics of nanomaterials. The success of this project will be achieved through a collaboration with Dr. Cyrille Boyer at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Center for Nanomedicine to understand better ways to design drug carriers.
Polymerization-induced thermal self-assembly (PITSA) relies on the in situ aggregation of polymer chains during a reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer dispersion block copolymerization. By conjugating a fraction of the macro chain transfer agents with a protein, the protein should be encapsulated into vesicles as the nanoparticles undergo morphological transitions during a PITSA polymerization. These protein-containing vesicles will then act as ?nanoreactors,? catalyzing the conversion of prodrugs to their active form and the degradation of the vesicles into their polymeric substituents. The model developed through this collaboration will provide the synthetic foundation to better emulate and understand complex nanoscale compartmentalization, while being immediately applicable to the fields of polymer chemistry, biomimetic synthesis, and medicinal chemistry.
This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Australian Academy of Science.
