High-Throughput Routes to Biomaterials Discovery

Many existing clinical treatments are limited in their ability to completely restore decreased or lost tissue and organ function, an unenviable situation only further exacerbated by a globally aging population. As a result, the demand for new medical interventions has increased substantially over the past 20 years, with the burgeoning fields of gene therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine showing promise to offer solutions for full repair or replacement of damaged or aging tissues. Success in these fields, however, inherently relies on biomaterials that are engendered with the ability to provide the necessary biological cues mimicking native extracellular matrixes that support cell fate. Accelerating the development of such "directive" biomaterials requires a shift in current design practices toward those that enable rapid synthesis and characterization of polymeric materials and the coupling of these processes with techniques that enable similarly rapid quantification and optimization of the interactions between these new material systems and target cells and tissues. This manuscript reviews recent advances in combinatorial and high-throughput (HT) technologies applied to polymeric biomaterial synthesis, fabrication, and chemical, physical, and biological screening with targeted end-point applications in the fields of gene therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Limitations of, and future opportunities for, the further application of these research tools and methodologies are also discussed.

Polymerizations in Continuous Flow: Recent Advances in the Synthesis of Diverse Polymeric Materials

The number of reports using continuous flow technology in tubular reactors to perform precision polymerizations has grown enormously in recent years. Flow polymerizations allow highly efficient preparation of polymers exhibiting well-defined molecular characteristics, and has been applied to a slew of monomers and various polymerization mechanisms, including anionic, cationic, radical, and ring-opening. Polymerization conducted in continuous flow offers several distinct advantages, including improved efficiency, reproducibility, and enhanced safety for exothermic polymerizations using highly toxic components, high pressures, and high temperatures. The further development of this technology is thus of relevance for many industrial polymerization processes. While much progress has been demonstrated in recent years, opportunities remain for increasing the compositional and architectural complexity of polymeric materials synthesized in a continuous fashion. Extending the reactor processing principles that have heretofore been focused on optimizing homopolymerization to include multisegment block copolymers, particularly from monomers that propagate via incompatible mechanisms, represents a major challenge and coveted target for continuous flow polymerization. Likewise, the spatial and temporal control of reactivity afforded by flow chemistry has and will continue to enable the production of complex polymeric architectures. This Viewpoint offers a brief background of continuous flow polymerization focused primarily on tubular (micro)reactors and includes selected examples that are relevant to these specific developments.

Enabling technologies in polymer synthesis: accessing a new design space for advanced polymer materials

This review discusses how developments in laboratory technologies can push the boundaries of what is achievable using existing polymer synthesis techniques.

Purification of poly(acrylic acid) using a membrane ultra-filtration unit in flow

We have developed methodology to synthesise aqueous soluble polymers such as poly(acrylic acid) in flow, enabling access to a variety of molecular weights.