New mechanisms for controlled polymer degradation and their incorporation into functional three-dimensional materials

在环境或人体中降解为小分子的聚合物在从包装到医疗器械的广泛应用中受到学术界和工业界的极大关注。理想情况下，聚合物在执行其功能时将是高度稳定的，但在所需条件下将迅速分解。目前可用的材料通常通过随机主链断裂进行降解，并在广泛的环境中逐渐降解，限制了我们触发和控制这种降解的能力。拟议的研究计划的目的是开发一类聚合物，降解特定的端到端的解聚机制，响应于从聚合物末端的刺激响应性端帽的裂解。新的封端响应不同的刺激，如在氧化或还原物种，热，光，甚至多种组合的浓度变化，这样的刺激将被开发，提高我们的理解，其降解行为，并展示了潜在的调整这些聚合物的各种应用。通过仔细设计这些封端，也将制备由多个嵌段组成的聚合物。新单体的引入将使得聚合物的性质能够被调整，进一步进行化学衍生化，并且引入新功能，例如药物引入。

Polymers that undergo degradation to small molecules in the environment or in the human body are of significant interest to both academia and industry for a wide range of applications from packaging to medical devices. Ideally, a polymer would be highly stable while performing its function, but would break down rapidly under the desired conditions. Currently available materials typically undergo degradation by random backbone scission and degrade gradually in a wide range of environments, limiting our ability to trigger and control this degradation. The proposed research program aims to develop a class of polymers that degrade specifically by an end-to-end depolymerization mechanism in response to the cleavage of a stimuli-responsive end-cap from the polymer terminus. New end-caps responsive to different stimuli such as changes in the concentrations of oxidizing or reducing species, heat, light and even multiple combinations of such stimuli will be developed, enhancing our understanding of their degradation behavior and demonstrating the potential to tune these polymers for a variety of applications. Through careful design of these end-caps, polymers composed of multiple blocks will also be prepared. The incorporation of new monomers will enable the properties of the polymers to be tuned, further chemical derivatization to be performed, and for new functions such as drug incorporation to be introduced.