Titre : Biodegradable Polymers and Their Assembly into Functional and Stimuli-Responsive Materials.
Endroit : Pavillon Roger-Gaudry, salle G-815 à 11 h
Hôte : Professeure Andreea Schmitzer
La conférence sera prononcée (en anglais) par la professeure Elizabeth Gillies, du Département de chimie de l'University of Western Ontario.
Résumé : Biomaterials are increasingly important in the development of new strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of disease. In particular, many drugs and drug candidates exhibit undesirable properties such as low solubility, rapid excretion, or an inability to cross cell membranes. Their incorporation into nanosized biomaterials such as micelles, nanoparticles or vesicles can address these issues. With the goal of obtaining optimal performance, increasing demands are placed on the materials to perform multiple functions such as tissue targeting and “smart” release, while at the same time maintaining biocompatibility and degradability. This talk will describe the Gillies group’s research on the development of surface functionalization approaches for polymer vesicles, aimed at modulating their biological properties and functions including cell uptake and lectin binding. It will also describe our development of class of polymers that depolymerize end-to-end upon the cleavage of a stimuli-responsive end-cap for the polymer terminus. Our progress in tuning the depolymerization rate and developing new polymer backbones will be summarized.
