Rational Integration of Molecular and surface interactions for lubricating, adhesive and high penetration soft materials

软聚合物材料被广泛用作工业和日常生活设备中的药物输送系统、粘合剂或润滑剂。随着软微电子、可穿戴诊断或软机器人等新技术领域的出现，预计在不久的将来，它们的使用将进一步增长。尽管经过几十年的开发和优化，这些材料的性能已经得到了改善，但用于它们设计的基本概念出人意料地没有显著演变。这种停滞不前造成了知识的缺乏，阻碍了需要快速粘合/脱粘、刺激响应性润滑或高组织渗透的新技术的翻译。开发这类材料所固有的技术挑战是控制材料与其环境之间的分子间力。目前的研究计划的目的是缓解这种知识的缺乏，并通过将分子和表面相互作用合理地整合到新型软材料的设计中来提供技术创新。我们的方法包括使用具有独特结构的软聚合物，称为瓶刷(BB)，并将此类聚合物集成到刺激响应性材料中。BB聚合物的独特性质及其与环境协同作用的能力使人们能够创造出以前从未探索过的新技术。我们的研究计划探索了三个主要领域：1-刺激响应性润滑系统，2-刺激响应性粘合剂，3-深层组织药物输送的刺激响应性纳米设备。这些研究将建立独特的知识基础，以推动刺激响应性BB聚合物的开发，并验证它们在目前需求旺盛的新技术中的潜在用途。我们预计，加拿大的生物技术行业将从本研究计划期间将测试的不同技术平台中受益最大。

Soft polymeric materials are widely used as drug delivery systems, adhesive or lubricants in industrial and everyday life devices. With the emergence of new technological fields such as soft microelectronics, wearable diagnostics or soft robotics, their use is expected to grow even more in the near future. Even though the properties of these materials have been improved over decades of development and optimization, the fundamental concepts used for their design has surprisingly not significantly evolved. This stagnancy has created a lack of knowledge that is hampering the translation of novel technologies where fast bonding/debonding, stimuli responsive lubrication or high tissue penetration are required. The technological challenge inherent to the development of such materials is the control of intermolecular forcesbetween the material and its environment. The aim of the present research program is to palliate to this lack of knowledge and to provide technological innovations by rationally integrating molecular and surface interactions into the design of novel soft materials. Our approach consists in using soft polymers exhibiting a unique architecture called bottle-brush (BB) and to integrate such polymers into stimuli responsive materials. The unique properties of BB polymers and their ability to interact in synergy with their environment enables the creation of novel technologies never explored before. Our research program explores three main areas: 1- Stimuli responsive lubricating systems 2-Stimuli responsive adhesives 3-Stimuli responsive nanodevices for deep tissue drug delivery These studies will build a unique ground of knowledge to advance the development of stimuli responsive BB polymers and validate their potential use in new technologies that are presently in high demand. We foresee that Canada's biotechnological industry will benefit the most from the different technological platforms that will be tested during this research program.