The use of polymers as drug delivery vehicles that target specific tissues and cells in the body is a growing topic of interest for biomedical research. The focus of this project is to employ ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) strategy to polymerize synthetic monomers of the antibiotic amikacin. The end-goal is to create a polymer pro-drug that could be used for site-specific drug delivery and slowly releases the drug over time. The synthesis requires five steps: protect the amine groups of amikacin, determine the reactivity of hydroxyl groups on the drug, create a norbornene derivative to use as the drug scaffold, attach the norbornene derivative to the drug, and polymerize this monomer using a third generation Grubbs catalyst. The amine groups on amikacin have been Boc protected. Currently, the focus of the project revolves around purifying Boc protected amikacin and increasing the yield at this synthetic step to prepare sufficient precursor needed to proceed to the subsequent reactions.

Synthesizing amikacin containing polymers for targeted drug delivery using ring opening metathesis polymerization

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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