Nowadays, advanced nanoscale carries for drug delivery are receiving tremendous attention in nanomedicine. The need for drug nanocarriers that efficiently target diseased areas in the body arise because drug efficacy is often altered by nonspecific cell and tissue biodistribution, and because some drugs are rapidly metabolized or excreted from the body. In this sense, much attention has been directed to environmentally responsive crosslinked colloidal particles, known as nanogels, considering their unique property to swell rapidly in a thermodynamically good solvent, responding to external stimuli such as temperature, ionic strength, magnetic field, biomolecules, or pH, among others. Furthermore, their small size allows them to overcome various biological barriers and achieve passive and active targeting, which reduce adverse reactions in tumour therapy. What is more, due to their porous structure they are able to contain small molecules inside and release them by changing their volume. These properties make them interesting and suitable materials to be used as nanocarriers in drug/gene delivery.1,2 During the last few years, our research group has been focused on the design of multi-responsive nanogels able to combine multiple stimuli for advanced bio-applications.3-5 In this talk, our most recent approaches will be presented showing special interest in the synthesis strategies, and also in the colloidal characterization of the nanogels. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work has been supported by the Spanish Plan Nacional de Materiales (MAT2012-36270-C04-01). REFERENCES 1.- J. Ramos, J. Forcada, R. Hidalgo-Alvarez, Chem. Rev. 2014, 114, 367. 2.- J. Ramos, A. Imaz, J. Forcada, Polym. Chem. 2012, 3, 852. 3.- J. Ramos, R. Hidalgo-Alvarez, J. Forcada, Soft Matter 2013, 9, 8415. 4.- G. Aguirre, J. Ramos, J. Forcada, Soft Matter 2013, 9, 261. 5.- A. Pikabea, J. Ramos, J. Forcada, Part. Part. Syst. Charact. 2014, 31, 101.

Design of stimuli-responsive nanogels for bioapplications

249th National Meeting (2015)

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