Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 6
Functional Polymersomes for
Controlled Drug Delivery
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FENGHUA MENG, RU CHENG, CHAO DENG AND
ZHIYUAN ZHONG*
Biomedical Polymers Laboratory, and Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced
Functional Polymer Design and Application, Department of Polymer Science
and Engineering, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials
Science, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, P. R. China
*
E-mail: zyzhong@suda.edu.cn
6.1 Introduction
Polymersomes (also referred to as polymeric vesicles) have attracted rapidly
growing interest since the early work of Eisenberg, Discher, Hammer, and co-
workers,
1,2
due to their intriguing aggregation phenomena and cell- and virus-
mimicking functions, as well as their tremendous potential applications in
medicine, pharmacy, and biotechnology. Polymersomes have fluid-filled cores
with membranes that consist of entangled chains separating the core from the
outside medium.
3
Together with micelles, they are the most common
morphological structures of amphiphiles in water. However, unlike micelles,
which mostly encapsulate hydrophobic compounds, polymersomes can not
only encapsulate hydrophobic molecules within the membrane but also load
hydrophilic molecules within the aqueous interior. While liposomes are made
from small phospholipid molecules, polymersomes are microscopic assemblies
of
macromolecular
amphiphiles
of
vastly different
architectures (diblock,
