Towards being genuinely smart: ‘isothermally- responsive’ polymers as versatile, programmable scaffolds for biologically-adaptable materials

(2015) Towards being genuinely smart : 'isothermally-responsive' polymers as versatile, programmable scaffolds for biologically-adaptable materials. Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work of researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. This article is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license and may be reused according to the conditions of the license. For more details see A note on versions: The version presented in WRAP is the published version, or, version of record, and may be cited as it appears here. Responsive polymers have found diverse application across polymer, biomaterials, medical, sensing and engineering fields. Despite many years of study, this has focussed mainly on those polymers which undergo thermally-induced changes – either a lower or upper critical solution temperature. To rival the adaptability of Nature's macromolecules, polymers must respond in a 'smarter' way to other triggers such as enzymes, biochemical gradients, ion concentration or metabolites, to name a few. Here we review the concept of 'isothermal' responses where core thermoresponsive polymers are chemically engineered such that they undergo their useful response (such as coil-globule transition, cell uptake or cargo release) but at constant temperature. This is achieved by consideration of their phase diagram where solubility can be changed by small structural changes to the end-group, side-chain/substituents or through main chain modification/binding. The current state-of-the-art is summarised here.