Poly(ortho ester)s (POEs) are well-known for their surface-eroding properties and hence present unique opportunities for controlled-release and tissue-engineering applications.T heir development and wide-spread investigation has, however,b een severely limited by challenging synthetic requirements that incorporate unstable intermediates and are therefore highly irreproducible.H erein, the first catalytic method for the synthesis of POEs using air-a nd moisturestable vinyl acetal precursors is presented. The synthesis of arange of POE structures is demonstrated, including those that are extremely difficult to achieve by other synthetic methods. Furthermore,a pplication of this chemistry permits efficient installation of functional groups through ortho ester linkages on an aliphatic polycarbonate.The use of biodegradable polymers for controlled drug release and tissue engineering represents one of the most important advances in biomedicine. [1][2][3] An ideal material would display as urface erosion profile in which hydrolysis occurs faster than water ingress into the materials and results in sequential erosion of the surface layers. [4,5] Such profiles enable idealized zero-order release profiles and predictable materials properties throughout degradation.[6] Despite these benchmark requirements,t he paucity of easily accessible surface eroding materials have led to extensive study of bulk eroding materials,s uch as poly(lactic acid) and poly(ecaprolactone), [7,8] in which water diffusion into the material occurs at acomparable or faster rate to hydrolysis.This results in anon-linear mass loss over time,amplified by autocatalysis from trapped degradation products,w hich in turn leads to non-linear release by encapsulants,s ignificant burst effects, and uncontrolled loss of mechanical stability.Despite the clear potential advantages of surface erodible polymers,examples are limited to only afew families,such as poly(anhydride)s [9,10] and poly(ortho ester)s (POEs). [11,12] Them ilder degradation products present POEs as ap otentially more attractive choice for in vivo applications and, indeed, POE types III and IV (Figure 1) have shown significant promise in ocular [11][12][13][14] as well as gene delivery. [11,12] However,their synthesis typically involves either step-growth polymerization of the highly air-a nd moisture-sensitive diketene acetal (3,9-bis(ethylidene-2,4,8,10-tetraoxaspiro-[5,5]undecane (DETSOU;S cheme 1) with ad iol, [15] or transesterification between at riorthoester and triol.[16] Both procedures present significant synthetic challenges when it comes to producing repeatable polymer characteristics,which likely results because the highly reactive ketene acetal monomers compromises the high levels of purity required for successful step-growth polymerization. More recently, some success was achieved by preparing ortho-ester-containing monomers by multistep syntheses to create poly(ortho ester amide)s and poly(ortho ester urethane)s.[17] Despite these advances,f urther development of gene...