Development, analysis and application of biocompatible polymers

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When synthetic materials are exposed to blood or injected into an animal they generally elicit protein-based reactions aimed at neutralizing the foreign body.  Coating the synthetic material with polymers has been found to resist some of these rejection reactions, but the practice is not uniformly successful nor well understood.  We are proposing fundamental studies on two types of such systems: coatings of materials with polymer brushes and the use of hyperbranched polymers as albumin substitutes or drug carriers.  Brushes are polymers grown so close together from an initiating surface that they are forced into a more extended configuration than they would take up if not constrained by their neighbours.  Brushes are expected to be repulsive to proteins trying to penetrate them but we have found this is not generally true and propose basic studies to provide understanding of this puzzle.  Hyperbranched polymers act somewhat like proteins because of their compact solution configuration.  Each branch ends in a reactive group that can be derivatized to enhance binding of small molecules or to add short linear polymer chains that provide protection from the immune system. Hydrophobic binding of fatty acids is particularly important for an albumin mimic so we propose detailed studies of this kind of reaction.  We will also study how these materials interact with cell surfaces and how such interactions could be enhanced to provide a more local source of the bound species to cells.