Focus on polymer chemistry papers in Science China Chemistry of the year 2010

Abstract

The journal Science China Chemistry published 63 papers in polymer fields in 2010, leading to a percentage increase of 473% compared to the year 2008 and 70% to the year 2009, respectively (Figure 1). In this year, three polymer Special Topics were designed and published: Biomedical Polymer (Number 3) [1], Advances in Principles of Polymerization (Number 8) [2] and Highly Branched Polymers-Promising Architectural Macromolecules (Number 12) [3]. Several high qualified papers were published and great achievements have been obtained in the year 2010.The Special Topic of Biomedical Polymers was organized by Prof. GAO ChangYou and GU ZhongWei. According to these papers one knows that the applications of biomedical polymers are focusing on drug release [4-8] and gene delivery [9,10]. For the drug release system, a great number of materials can be utilized such as supermolecule, block copolymers, hyperbranched polymers, etc. Yan et al. synthesized a series of hyperbranched copolymers and explored their applications, especially in drug release [4,11,12].In their researches, two kinds of novel temperature-responsive hyperbranched multiarm copolymers were successfully synthesized via the atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). Poly(3-ethyl-3-(hydroxymethyl) oxetane) (HBPO) core and thermosensitive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) arms were synthesized from NIPAM monomers by using a hyperbranched HBPO macroinitiator. Moreover, poly(L-lactide) (PLA) inner-shell and poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) outer-shell with disulfide-linkages between the hydrophobic and hydrophilic moieties was developed as unimolecular micelles. The HBPO-star-PNIPAM self-assembled micelles showed much improved drug encapsulation efficiencies and temperature-dependent sustainable release behavior due to the special micellar structure. The micelles exhibited no apparent cytotoxicity against human HeLa cells. The H40-star-PLA-SS-PEG bioreducible unimolecular micelles were proved as promising carriers for the triggered intracellular delivery of hydrophobic anticancer drugs. Gu's review discussed peptide dendrimers synthesis and functionalization and their applications in biomedicine for drug release and gene delivery [13]. There are two main advantages of the peptide dendrimers, i.e. the size controllable synthesis even to nanometers and the good biocompatibility due to their similar properties as proteins. Therefore, the peptide dendrimers have received considerable attention in biomedicine. They also investigated a novel supramolecular nanoparticle, and studied the drug release behavior and the anti-tumor effects. The results demonstrate that the supramolecular nanoparticles are biocompatible and are promising carriers for drug delivery. Zhang et al. discussed several kinds of stimulus-responsive nanoparticles, including pH-responsive, temperature-responsive, lightresponsive, magnetic-responsive, ultrasound-responsive, pH/

The Developing Status of High-Throughput Drug Screening Microfluidic Chip by FRET on Medicine

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