A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign say that they know how to reverse the characteristics of a key bonding material—polyurea—to provide an inexpensive alternative for a broad number of applications, such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, and packaging.
“Polymers with transient stability in aqueous solution, also known as hydrolyzable polymers, have been applied in many biomedical applications, such as in the design of drug delivery systems, scaffolds for tissue regeneration, surgical sutures, and transient medical devices and implants,” explained Jianjun Cheng, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois. “The highly inert urea bond makes the inexpensive polymer extremely stable, a property that is suitable for some long-lasting applications.”
Cheng and his colleagues have developed a class of “hindered urea bond-containing polymeric materials” or “poly(hindered urea)s” (PHUs)—cheap polymers, which the team says, can be designed to degrade over a specified time period, making them potentially useful in biomedical applications.
“While conventional polyurea are very stable against hydrolysis, PHUs can be completely hydrolyzed within a few days,” Cheng added. “Since ‘hindrance’ is the cause of the bond destabilization, the hydrolysis kinetics of PHUs can be easily tuned as needed for a specific application. They can potentially be environmentally friendly green and sustainable materials as well.”
