Bestowing function to a degradable polymer backbone enables the creation of materials with almost endless possibilities. Of particular interest to us is to develop synthetic routes to combine radical graft-polymerization with a living characteristic with ring-opening polymerization, thereby producing an acrylic polymer with a degradable backbone. Traditionally, this task is often a product of tedious lab work with many-steps, low yields, and as a consequence high cost and a large carbon foot-print. In order to overcome these shortcomings we have turned our attention towards an unexploited, a-bromine functional and also commercially available member of the lactone monomer family, a-Bromo-?-buryrolactone (aBr?BL). The class of ?-lactones monomers is extremely thermodynamically stable, which hinder them from being homopolymerized at conventional temperatures and pressures; however, they can be copolymerized. We therefore explored this ability in copolymers with both e-caprolactone and L-lactide. This allowed us to generate an easy and straight forward route to a degradable macro-initiator susceptible for further grafting reactions. Our grafting was performed under SET-LRP conditions and realized with the aid of the fluorinated alcohol, 2,2,2-trifloroethanol, that acted as a universal solvent for the hydrophobic polymer backbone, together with a wide range of different acrylates with varying polarity.1(1) Ols�n, P.; Undin, J.; Odelius, K.; Albertsson, A.-C. Polym. Chem. 2014  , Accepted Manuscript.

Functional degradable polymers � simplified

248th National Meeting (2014)

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