Host-guest chemistry of star-shaped block copolymer based unimolecular micelles

PMSE 101

Michael A. R. Meier, m.a.r.meier@tue.nl, Laboratory of Macromolecular Chemistry and Nanoscience, Eindhoven University of Technology and Dutch Polymer Institute (DPI), P.O. Box 513, Eindhoven, 5600 MB, Netherlands and Ulrich S. Schubert, u.s.schubert@tue.nl, Laboratory of Macromolecular Chemistry and Nanoscience, Eindhoven University of Technology and Dutch Polymer Institute, PO Box 513, Eindhoven, 5600 MB, Netherlands.
Unimolecular core-shell architectures have gained large attraction during the last years because of their manifold application possibilities, such as drug delivery, stimuli responsive release, catalysis, or phase transfer. Moreover, combinatorial techniques in polymer research offer great possibilities for a fast synthesis of new materials as well as the corresponding accelerated property investigation. Within this contribution we report on the controlled ring opening polymerization of ε-caprolactone in an automated synthesizer utilizing a five arm star-shaped poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) macroinitiator to obtain core-shell like reversed unimolecular micelles with PEG inner and poly(caprolactone) outer blocks. Thereby, the size of the outer block could be varied to obtain nano-objects of different molecular weights in a controlled fashion. We will focus our discussion on the property screening of these interesting materials in a parallel approach, revealing several application possibilities in the field of nano-carriers and sensoric systems.