Synthesis of crosslinkable diblock terpolymers PDPA- b-P(NMS- co-OEG) and preparation of shell-crosslinked pH/redox-dual responsive micelles as smart nanomaterials

Jingjing Sun; Zhao Wang; Amin Cao; Ruilong Sheng

doi:10.1039/c9ra05082e

Synthesis of crosslinkable diblock terpolymers PDPA- b-P(NMS- co-OEG) and preparation of shell-crosslinked pH/redox-dual responsive micelles as smart nanomaterials

RSC Adv. 2019 Oct 29;9(59):34535-34546. doi: 10.1039/c9ra05082e. eCollection 2019 Oct 23.

Authors

Jingjing Sun^{1

2}, Zhao Wang^{2

3}, Amin Cao², Ruilong Sheng^{1

2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiology, Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University Shanghai 200072 China.
² Key Laboratory of Synthetic and Self-assembly Chemistry for Organic Functional Molecules, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, CAS Lingling Road 345 Shanghai 200032 China.
³ Department of Materials, Jinling Institute of Technology Nanjing 211169 China.
⁴ CQM - Centro de Química da Madeira, Universidade da Madeira Campus da Penteada 9000-390 Funchal Portugal ruilong.sheng@staff.uma.pt.

Abstract

Crosslinked polymer nanomaterials have attracted great attention due to their stability and highly controllable drug delivery; herein, a series of well-defined amphiphilic PDPA-b-P(NMS-co-OEG) diblock terpolymers (P1-P3) were designed and prepared via RAFT polymerization and were self-assembled into non-cross-linked (NCL) nanomicelles, which were further prepared into shell-cross-linked (SCL) micelles via cystamine-based in situ shell cross-linking. Using P3 as an optimized polymer, SCL-P3 micelles were prepared, which demonstrated remarkable pH/redox-dual responsive behaviour. For drug delivery, camptothecin (CPT)-loaded SCL-P3 micelles were prepared and showed much higher CPT-loading capability than their NCL-P3 counterparts. Notably, the SCL-P3 micelles showed good synergistic pH/redox-dual responsive CPT release properties, making them potential "smart" nanocarriers for drug delivery.