Cationic Polymer Brush Coated Nanoparticles for Gene Delivery

Abstract

Polymer brushes generated via “grafting-from” approach emerged as an attractive surface modification tool offering chemical stability, synthetic flexibility and unprecedented control over the polymer grafting density, thickness, chemical composition and functionality. They display interesting features to many applications in regenerative medicine including cell culture, tissue engineering and as delivery systems due to exquisite control of physicochemical and biological properties. Cationic polymer brushes are particularly attractive in the field of designing effective vectors for gene delivery as polymer brush allows the design and coating of a variety of particles with well-defined core-shell architecture and chemistry to efficiently condense and deliver nucleic acids. This thesis concentrates on designing safe and efficient gene delivery vectors based on ‘graft from’ cationic polymer brush and understanding the interaction of nucleic acids with polymer brush. Chapter one presented fundamental knowledge of polymer brush and its biomedical application. The first part of this chapter describes the definition of polymer brush, the preparation strategies, mechanism of atom transfer radical polymerisation and the responsiveness of polymer brush including solvent, pH and ionic strength. The second part discusses the state-of-art applications of polymer brush in regenerative medicine including protein resistant polymer brush for tissue engineering and as drug/gene delivery systems.