Controlled drug delivery is useful because it allows to obtain better drug product effectiveness, reliability and safety. Interest in stimuli-responsive polymers is steadily gaining increasing momentum especially in the fields of controlled and self-regulated drug delivery. Stimuliresponsive or “smart“ polymers are macromolecules that display a significant physiochemical change in response to s...

Over the past 25 years many interesting biomedical uses have been proposed for stimuli-responsive polymers, including uses in diagnostics, drug delivery, tissue engineering (regenerative medicine), and cell culture. This article briefly overviews the field of stimuli-responsive polymers and describes some of the most successful biomedical applications to date of such "smart" polymers. Other int...

Two novel semirigid smart polymers based on mesogen-jacketed liquid crystal polymers were successfully synthesized via free radical polymerization, which showed both characteristic liquid crystal properties of mesogen-jacketed liquid crystal polymers and remarkably reversible thermoresponsive phase transition behaviors.

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Smart polymers have enormous potential in various applications. In particular, smart polymeric drug delivery systems have been explored as "intelligent" delivery systems able to release, at the appropriate time and site of action, entrapped drugs in response to specific physiological triggers. These polymers exhibit a non-linear response to a small stimulus leading to a macroscopic alteration i...

In agricultural field, polymers are widely used for many applications. Although they were used, in the first time, just as structural materials (inhert polymers), in the last decades functionalized polymers revolutionized the agricultural and food industry with new tools for several applications. Smart polymeric materials and smart delivery systems helped the agricultural industry to combat vir...

Polymers that respond to small changes in environmental stimuli with large, sometimes discontinuous changes in their physical state or properties are often called "intelligent" or "smart" polymers. We have conjugated these polymers to different recognition proteins, including antibodies, protein A, streptavidin, and enzymes. These bioconjugates have been prepared by random polymer conjugation t...

Two thermoresponsive polymers based on alkyl modified poly-vinylpyrrolidone (PVP) that exhibit very sensitive and reversible temperature-dependant water solubility are described. The application of these polymers as Au nanocatalyst stabilizers leads to a "smart" thermoresponsive Au nanoparticle catalyst.