Polymers represent an important class of organic compounds that are used for many years in the development of biomaterials. Among them, amphiphilic block copolymers are among the most attractive systems for drug delivery applications. We report here an overview on the self-assembly in water of amphiphilic block copolymers into different nanomedicines, mainly focusing on polymer vesicles, also referred as polymersomes, and their applications in loading and controlled release of both hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules and biomolecules.<br/>We pay special attention to polysaccharide and polypeptide-based block copolymer vesicles and their development in nanomedicine. Indeed, the field of synthetic polypeptides has seen many significant advances in recent years, including studies on block and hybrid copolypeptides that form vesicles, fibrils, and other structures with potential applications in medicine and materials chemistry. However, the development of glycosylated polypeptides has not kept pace, primarily due to the inability to readily synthesize glycopolypeptides in a controlled manner. Glycosylation of natural proteins provides diverse functionality such as mediation of recognition events, modification of protein conformations, ect, that may find interest and application in biomedical field. In this context, we developed over the last years synthetic strategies for the design of glycosylated polypeptides and polysaccharide-polypeptide biohybrids with controlled placement of sugar functionality. We were especially interested in designing amphiphilic copolymers able to self-assemble into well- defined micelles and vesicles that can advantageously be loaded with drugs and present a surface with multivalent presentation of bioactive saccharides or oligosaccharides. The ability of these nanoparticles for different biomedical applications, from drug-delivery to inhibitor, will be presented. We especially evidenced the particular benefit of nanoparticles and their multivalency toward the interaction with biological receptors.<b> </b>

Biomimetic polymer-based self-assembled nanomedicine

256th National Meeting (2018)

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