Abstract
Polylactic acid (PLA) has found widespread use in plastics and in biomedical applications due to its biodegradability into natural benign products. However, PLA-based materials remain limited in usefulness due to difficulty of incorporating functional groups into the polymer backbone. In this paper, we report a strategy for PLA functionalization that establishes the preparation of highly derivatized materials in which ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) is employed as a graft-from polymerization technique utilizing a norbornene-modified handle incorporated into the PLA backbone. As a demonstration of this new synthetic methodology, a PLA-derived nanoparticle bearing imidazole units protected with a photolabile group was prepared. The morphology of this material could be controllably altered in response to exposure of UV light or acidic pH as a stimulus. We anticipate that this graft-from approach to derivatization of PLA could find broad use in the development of modified, biodegradable PLA-based materials.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 567-570 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Chemical Communications |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 11 2016 |
Funding
This work was partially supported by the NSF (CHE-0847530) and the AFOSR (FA9550-12-1-0435). We thank Dr Matt Thompson for his technical assistance with polymer characterization. The authors also thank Dr Angela Blum for her critical reading of the manuscript and helpful suggestions. We also acknowledge the UCSD Cryo-Electron Microscopy Facility and Norm Olsen for TEM training and assistance.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
- General Chemistry
- Ceramics and Composites
- Metals and Alloys
- Materials Chemistry
- Surfaces, Coatings and Films
- Catalysis