Professor Zhang Xiaojin from the School of Materials and Chemistry, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) has made significant progress in the synthesis and application of cationic polycarbonates. Recently, a review paper entitled "Cationic polycarbonates via ring-opening polymerization: Design, synthesis, and applications" was published in Polymer Chemistry, a polymer journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). The first author of the paper is Associate Professor Dai Yu, and the corresponding author is Professor Zhang Xiaojin.
Polycarbonate has been widely studied and applied in surgical sutures, bone fixation materials and drug controlled release due to its good biocompatibility, biodegradability and mechanical properties. However, conventional polycarbonate has poor hydrophilicity and lacks the properties of further chemical modification. The above problems can be effectively solved by changing the chemical structure of the main chain or introducing functional groups (such as carboxyl, amino, hydroxyl). Cationic polycarbonate can be obtained by introducing cations (such as ammonium, pyridine, imidazole, matte, phosphine, ferrocene) into polycarbonate.
Although cationic polycarbonates have made great progress, there are still some challenges. For example: the steps of cyclic carbonate monomer synthesis and functionalized polycarbonate modification are cumbersome; it is difficult to precisely control the molecular weight, composition and structure of cationic polycarbonates; reproducibility of animal experiments in vitro and in vivo.
The above work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51703209, 21603196), the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2017CFB217) and the special project funds for basic scientific research business expenses in central universities (CUG170601, CUGL170406).
Paper link:
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2018/py/c8py01365a
DOI: 10.1039/C8PY01365A
