Lanterna Rally

Author: Victor Lotocki

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

"The delivery of lipophilic active pharmaceutical compounds to disease sites continues to be an active area of research due to their poor aqueous solubility and biological stability. The self-assembly of amphiphilic diblock copolymers into micellar nanoparticles has historically enabled the encapsulation of such drugs by solubilizing and stabilizing them within their hydrophobic cores, while hydrophilic coronae provides micelles with aqueous solubility and biological stealth. Miktoarm star polymers are branched architectures in which at least three polymeric arms emanate from a central core junction, and in which at least two of those arms are dissimilar. Such branching architectures form micelles with lower critical micelle concentrations (CMC), higher overall drug loading contents, and more sustained drug release profiles. The synthesis of miktoarm stars has traditionally been carried out by a combination of arm-first and core-first methodologies, in which polymer segments are synthesized first and then grafted to a central core molecule, or in which a heteromultifunctional core is used to initiate the polymerization of different arms respectively. Complications arising from low grafting efficiencies in arm-first methods, and difficulties in selecting different compatible functional groups for polymerization in core-first methods have prompted chemists to use a mixture of these two methods. The simplification of synthetic methods has helped enhance the scope miktoarm stars for applications in biology.The goals of this thesis were the synthesis of autogenous stimuli-responsive AB2 (A = polycaprolactone (PCL), B = poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)) miktoarm star polymers using a mixed arm- and core-first methodologies, a detailed evaluation of their self-assemblies, and the development of drug delivery formulations that promote targeting, and decrease off-targeting. We demonstrated that a combination of ring opening polymerization and Steglich esterification can be used to generate modular “building blocks”, which consist of polymer segments with or without incorporated thioketal and disulfide moieties. The latter are responsive to reactive oxygen species (ROS) or glutathione (GSH) respectively. We demonstrated that the combination of such PEG- and PCL-based building blocks, coupled through efficient copper-catalyzed alkyne-azide cycloaddition (CuAAC) “click” reactions, can greatly simplify the construction of miktoarm stars with different compositions and the pre-determined position based incorporation of stimuli-responsive entities. Tissues surrounding disease sites are associated with high levels of extracellular ROS, while GSH is overproduced intracellularly. Considering this redox gradient, thioketal and disulfide units were placed in spatially disparate locations near PEG chain ends or adjacent to the miktoarm polymer core junction. ROS-induced oxidative cleavage of thioketal moieties located along PEG backbones facilitates partial outer corona shedding in miktoarm stars self-assembled into micelles, thereby subtly increasing the release of loaded drugs, while keeping micelles intact. Micelles that are taken up intracellularly are exposed to heightened GSH concentrations that can reduce disulfide linkers at miktoarm polymer junctions, resulting in micellar collapse and a significant increase in drug release"--