With increasing interest in functional polymers for various applications, modular or tunable polymers have become a growing research area. A modular or tunable polymer is a polymer that serves as a platform for many different post-polymerization functionalizations. Controlling the structure of such polymers is essential since the structure directly affects the function. Hyperbranched polymers show interesting physical properties that differentiate them from their linear analogs. Many of these properties are similar to dendrimers, whose biomedical applications have been extensively studied. In this work, we describe the synthesis of modular hyperbranched RAFT polymers via two different polymerization methods to obtain polymers with predetermined branching frequencies and varying molecular weights. These polymers readily react with nucleophiles, such as amines, and therefore can be easily functionalized with many different reagents. Attachment of drugs or therapeutic agents will allow for these polymers to be used in biomedical applications, providing an alternative to dendrimers, which require a tedious step-by-step synthesis.

Hyperbranched modular polymers by RAFT polymerization

248th National Meeting (2014)

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