The design of polymers is of importance for applications in biomedicine such as tissue engineering and drug delivery. For the treatment of cancer, polymers are designed to enhance the half-life of the anticancer drug to accumulate it at tumor sites without damaging healthy cells. Various strategies have been developed including the use of polymers that are responsive to either an endogenous or exogenous stimulus. Thermoresponsive polymers have gain attention in this field due to their ability to respond to temperature leading to a sharp change in properties2 The two main types of thermoresponsive polymers are those exhibiting a lower critical solution temperature (LCST) with a change from soluble to insoluble upon increasing the temperature, e.g. poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), and those presenting an upper critical solution temperature (UCST) having the opposite behavior, e.g. poly(acrylamide-co-acrylonitrile).
Recently, our team has synthesized and investigated a comb polymer with pentaarginine pendent grafts exhibiting an UCST behavior. This behavior was attributed to the stacking of the guanidinium groups. The doctoral project will focus on the synthesis of comb polymers with different amino acids and the investigation of their thermoresponsive behavior, but also the encapsulation and release of an anticancer drug within the polymer in its collapsed state.
