Polymer Architecture and Drug Delivery

Abstract

Polymers occupy a major portion of materials used for controlled release formulations and drug-targeting systems because this class of materials presents seemingly endless diversity in topology and chemistry. This is a crucial advantage over other classes of materials to meet the ever-increasing requirements of new designs of drug delivery formulations. The polymer architecture (topology) describes the shape of a single polymer molecule. Every natural, seminatural, and synthetic polymer falls into one of categorized architectures: linear, graft, branched, cross-linked, block, star-shaped, and dendron/dendrimer topology. Although this topic spans a truly broad area in polymer science, this review introduces polymer architectures along with brief synthetic approaches for pharmaceutical scientists who are not familiar with polymer science, summarizes the characteristic properties of each architecture useful for drug delivery applications, and covers recent advances in drug delivery relevant to polymer architecture.

Click Chemistry, A Powerful Tool for Pharmaceutical Sciences

“…Due to their concentrated surface functionality and narrow polydispersity, dendrimers have been actively investigated as potential drug delivery carriers (68,69). They are typically synthesized via two strategies: by the divergent approach or by the convergent approach.…”

Properties of acyl modified poly(glycerol-adipate) comb-like polymers and their self-assembly into nanoparticles

“…For PGAB and PGAO, the polydispersity of the particles was very low, and consistently around 0.1, with some small variations (Supporting Information Figure S6a). The smaller size of PGAB NPs and 12% and 35% PGAO NPs was attributed to the fact that the short acyl chains could easily come in contact with each other and form strong hydrophobic interactions during the particle formation resulting in NP with a compacted core 41. However PGAO NPs, at 65% and 92% substitutions, exhibited a very large increase in size, larger size than PGAS NPs This result could be predominantly due to steric hindrance between alkyl chains inside the particle core and thus occupying a larger space in the particle core together with an increased aggregation number 17.…”

Peptide-Based Polymer Therapeutics

“…On the other hand and as the main drawback, some specific amino acid sequences or homopeptides can trigger disease cascades or their accumulation as aggregates may result in disease promotion, i.e., neurodegeneration disorders. Therefore, this possible impaired toxicity must be studied, and precise control of the selected amino acid composition and the final macromolecular architecture adopted have been defined as crucial design features [35][36][37][38]. It has to be emphasised that there is a growing effort to better understand the structure-activity relationships in order to better define safety and efficacy of these novel therapeutics [15].…”