IBM Research has traditionally supported its core technologies including the Microelectronic and Storage Divisions with innovations ranging from lithography to high performance insulators to storage materials. As many of these technologies have been divested in IBM’s continued re-invention, efforts have evolved to support emerging grow areas including, for example, cognitive computation, cloud and Watson Health.<br/><br/>Our current work focuses on developing new technologies in support of Watson Health, as the emerging field of nanomedicine offers tremendous promise for improving human health, curing disease, or repairing damaged tissues by applying the tools of nanotechnology to create and control materials with molecular-level medical effects. The targeting and controlled release of therapeutic agents as well as macromolecular therapeutics to specific organs and specific cells in the body is one of the major challenges in developing more effective therapies. Central to this goal are the many materials challenges associated with the encapsulation, transport and release of such agents at a specific time and place in the exceedingly complicated and dynamic environment of living organisms. We think that designed novel polymers with controlled functionalities, molecular weights, polydispersities, molecular architectures and topologies will play essential roles in the development of the field, particularly in the high-value areas of drug encapsulation, transport and delivery, as well as alternative antimicrobial agents. Nature's ability to assemble macromolecules into highly cooperative and functional assemblies provides an inspiration for our efforts to devise synthetic design criteria to interrogate and exploit the relationship between molecular structure, non-covalent interactions and processing conditions to create new functional macromolecular assemblies.

Evolution of polymer science at IBM: From microelectronics to Watson Health

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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