Drug formulation with controlled release, long half-life, and targeted delivery attracted much interest in recent designs of drug delivery systems. Use of field responsive or “smart” polymers seems a promising approach as they can achieve delivery at the appropriate time and site of action, entrapped drugs in response to specific physiological triggers. In current cancer treatment most polymeric nanomedicines cannot deliver drugs/genes/siRNA into the diseased sites and cells on-demand due to the biological barriers (vascular wall, tumor tissue, tumor cells) that the polynanomedicines have to overcome. Thereby, the stimuli-responsive polymeric nanomedicines that are triggered by external and internal stimuli such as pH, temperature, light, ultrasound, electronic and magnetic fields, biomolecules and enzymes, might solve this problem and realize on-demand dosing. For example, light responsive polymeric nanocarrier can achieve photocleavage reaction and cargo release under the controllable phototriggered reaction. Over many decades, interest in stimuli-responsive polymers has increased, and Creative BioMart has done great deal of work in developing new smart polymers. Below are examples of stimuli responsive materials that we have been working with.

Photo-reaction of drug (DOX) loaded amphiphilic copolymer micelle. Reprinted from Liu, Gong-Yan, et al. Journal of Materials Chemistry2012.