Polymer Chemistry

Biography

Biography: Jung Kwon (John) Oh

Abstract

Nanoscale platforms have been developed to improve the delivery and biodistribution of small anticancer therapeutics in chemotherapy. Self-assembled nanoassemblies based on amphiphilic block copolymers offer a broad choice of materials as promising nanocarriers for tumor-targeting drug delivery applications. It is imperative that drug-loaded nanocarriers are able to release encapsulated anticancer drugs in a rapid and controlled fashion after being taken up by cancer cells after extravasation into tumor tissues from blood circulation. Stimuli-responsive degradation (SRD) is a promising platform. SRD-exhibiting nanocarriers are stable under physiological conditions during blood circulation; however, they can be dissociated in a controlled fashion, thus leading to the enhanced release of encapsulated drugs as cellular components provide the appropriate stimuli to trigger biodegradation in microenvironments of tumors and inside cancer cells. Our group has put significant efforts to develop various strategies to synthesize novel reduction-responsive block copolymer-based nanocarriers with varying densities of disulfide linkages positioned at single and dual locations. Recently, we have focused on an effective SRD strategy that centers on the development of new intracellular nanocarriers having multiple stimuli-responsive cleavable linkages at multiple locations (denoted as multi-location multiple SRD (ML-MSRD) strategy). This strategy dramatically increases versatility since responses to each stimulus can independently and precisely regulate the release of encapsulated biomolecules at several locations.