Developing synthetic strategies to enable complete or partial degradation of vinyl polymers are of great importance because their accumulation in the environment is of increasing concern and it could offer new opportunities for the application of these materials, especially in the biomedical field.<br/>Herein we present our recent achievements in the design of degradable vinyl copolymers by controlled radical ring-opening polymerization (rROP) using cyclic ketene acetal (CKA) comonomers as ester bound precursors in the copolymer backbone. In particular, 2-methylene-4-phenyl-1,3-dioxolane (MPDL) was copolymerized with methacrylic monomers (e.g., MMA, OEGMA) by NMP to produce well-defined, non-cytotoxic and degradable copolymers exhibiting promising degradation properties when benchmarked against traditional polyesters. Other copolymerization systems based on rROP will also be presented, leading to either alternating or statistical copolymers, that can be degraded under hydrolytic and enzymatic conditions.<br/>This approach was eventually applied to: (i) the in-situ synthesis of degradable polymer nanoparticles by radical ring-opening copolymerization-induced self-assembly (rROPISA) and (ii) the "drug-initiated" synthesis of degradable polymer prodrug nanocarriers with tunable cytotoxicity against cancer cells.

Degradable vinyl materials for biomedical applications from controlled radical ring-opening copolymerization

2019 Fall National Meeting

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