Review: Syntheses of poly(lactic acid)s and their block copolymers for drug delivery applications

Abstract

Since the advent of supporting matrices for biological applications, many types of drugs have been administered via various forms of conventional drug delivery preparations, such as pills, solutions, creams, suppositories, injected gels and so on. Key parameters to all these systems for effective drug delivery are controlled release for sustained periods, targeted delivery, and enhancements of drug stability and efficacy, all of which can be manipulated by using polymers. Given the important impact of the structures of the polymers on these parameters, this mini‐review gives a simple introduction to the requirements of drug delivery systems and surveys the synthetic pathways to a key polymer in this field, namely poly(lactic acid). We also review the preparation of block copolymers that incorporate poly(lactic acid), to expand and further develop its properties for drug delivery systems. It is hoped that this short teacherly and introductory review will provide a basic stepping‐stone to more in‐depth reviews and papers and enable an easy access to this fast growing field. © 2023 Society of Industrial Chemistry.

Special issue: visionary polymer research for a better world. The professor R.G. ‘Dick’ Jones commemorative issue

“…His personality explains the great breadth and reach of the papers that we have in this series. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] I'd like to mention some of these briefly, as all are excellent and so very well speak for themselves. The paper by Graeme Moad reflects with gentle humour on how he, Dick and Aubrey Jenkins, a prior Chair of SPT, struggled with the development of a clear terminology for specific types of controlled chain polymerizations, and more particularly with the term reversible-deactivation radical polymerization (RDRP).…”