Abstract
Water-soluble and amphiphilic polymers are of great interest to industry and academia, as they can be used in applications such as biomaterials and drug delivery. Whilst ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) is a fast and functional group tolerant methodology for the synthesis of a wide range of polymers, its full potential for the synthesis of water-soluble polymers has yet to be realized. To address this, we report a general strategy for the synthesis of block copolymers in aqueous milieu using a commercially available ROMP catalyst and a macroinitiator approach. This allows for excellent control in the preparation of block copolymers in water. If the second monomer is chosen such that it forms a water-insoluble polymer, polymerization-induced self-assembly (PISA) occurs and a variety of self-assembled nano-object morphologies can be accessed.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 10672-10676 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Angewandte Chemie - International Edition |
Volume | 57 |
Issue number | 33 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 13 2018 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This work was supported by the ERC (grant number 615142), EPSRC and University of Warwick. We thank Dr. S. Bakker and Mr. R. Keogh (University of Warwick) for cryo-TEM assistance, Mr. Z. Hua for dry-state TEM assistance, and the Advanced BioImaging Research Technology Platform, BBSRC ALERT14 award BB/M01228X/1 for supporting cryo-TEM analysis.
Keywords
- Grubbs catalysts
- aqueous polymerization
- block copolymers
- polymerization-induced self-assembly
- ring-opening metathesis polymerization