Transporting Toxins to Tumors

Y ou could be forgiven for thinking you had misheard her at first: “I always found polymers to be a bit suspicious,” says Tanja Weil, who completed her doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and is now Director there. Polymers are long, often net-like molecules composed of numerous small chemical subunits that are repeated many times. The highly versatile and durable synthetic materials that have become indispensable to our everyday lives consist of these chains of molecules. The fact that Tanja Weil was nevertheless initially wary of polymers owes not least to aesthetic factors: “I felt that the beauty and precision of organic chemistry had been left by the wayside here.” The scientist, who switched to the MPI in Mainz from the University of Ulm in 2016, explains it in very simple terms: “In classical polymer chemistry, when you mix the monomers and press the start button, the reaction comes to an end at some point and that’s it.” In most cases, the product of such reactions is a more or less diverse mixture of chain molecules of varying lengths. Unsurprisingly, for her doctoral research, Weil also worked on one of the few polymer classes with a precisely defined structure: dendrimers – symmetrical tree-like molecules whose branches are assembled in a controlled fashion from the same basic chemical components.