Project Summary
The ability to synthesize anisotropic colloidally stable nanoparticles directly in water with complex shapes provides new materials for drug delivery, imaging, diagnostics, optical and electrical applications. Recently, we demonstrated a water-based emulsion polymerization method (i.e. the temperature directed morphology transformation, TDMT, method[12-14]) to produce tadpole nanostructures directly in water facilitated by a thermoresponsive block when combined with the solvent swelling-induced technique. Our TDMT method reproducibly produced these well-defined, uniform, and functional tadpole nanostructures directly in water, an environmentally friendly solvent, for potential use in biomedical applications and a synthetic procedure amenable to made at scale. We further demonstrated, for example, that Dox-functional tadpoles (prodrug delivery system) had enhanced cell entry into triple negative breast cancer cells with a significant decrease in the IC50.
Designing polymer nanoparticles with dynamic features would be interesting in a number of applications where in situ nanoscale structural changes could be used for delivery of drugs, induce signaling on or within cells, or provide a diagnostic signal when small changes in temperature occur.