New strategies for polymer development in pharmaceutical science - a short review
Résumé
We are developing synthetic polymers for pharmaceutical and medical applications. These applications can be broadly grouped on how the polymer will be utilized e.g. material, excipient or molecule. Our focus is to develop polymers with more de®ned structures that are based on biological, physicochemical and/or materials criteria. Strategies are being developed to more ef®ciently optimize structure±property correlations during preclinical development. We describe two examples of our research on pharmaceutical polymer development: narrow molecular weight distribution (MWD) homopolymeric precursors which can be functionalized to give families of narrow MWD homo- and co-polymers, and hydrolytically degradable
polymers.