Brush polymer-based nanostructures for drug delivery

Polymeric nanostructures have been broadly investigated for applications in drug delivery. As compared with other types of polymers, brush polymers (BPs) can possess not only unimolecular but also intermolecularly assembled nanostructures with versatile properties, and therefore drug delivery via BP-based scaffolds has attracted drastically increasing interest. A broad variety of BPs with diverse structural features and properties have been integrated with drugs via either physical encapsulation or chemical conjugation to construct BP-based drug-delivery systems. Besides drugs, various biomedical functionalities, including targeting ligands, imaging elements, and other biologically related moieties, can also be incorporated into these drug-delivery systems to further improve their therapeutic performance. In this chapter, an overview on BP-based drug-delivery systems is presented. Following a general discussion on structural design of BP-based scaffolds, BP-based drug-encapsulated, drug-conjugated, and multifunctional systems are discussed. The future research directions of BP-based drug-delivery systems are highlighted.