Functional Polymer For Drug And Gene Delivery

Polymeric nanoparticles have been widely explored as carriers for cancer-targeted delivery of therapeutic agents due to their advantages of few side effects and enhanced therapeutic efficacy. Polymer nanoparticles developed to date, however, have problems of stability, slow cellular internalization, low therapeutic efficiency in cancer chemotherapy and low transfection efficiency in gene delivery. Accordingly, in this dissertation, functional polymers including brush copolymer, pH responsive polymer, charge reversible polymer, cationic biodegradable polymer, modified polyethyleneimine, and tercopolymer brush were synthesized and characterized. Active nanocarriers including highly stable core-surface-crosslinking nanoparticles, fast-release nanoparticles and nuclear localization nanoparticles for drug delivery and virion-mimicking nanocapsules gene delivery were fabricated from these functional polymers and characterized by in vitro and in vivo experiments. These nanocarriers show much higher efficiency in cancer drug and gene delivery.