讲座题目：Polymer mechanochemistry enables controlling the activity of drugs, proteins and nucleic acids by ultrasound
主讲人：Andreas Herrmann 教授
主持人：孙静 研究员
开始时间：2024-08-08 10:00
讲座地址：闵行校区化学楼135
主办单位：化学与分子工程学院
报告人简介：
Andreas Herrmann studied chemistry at the University of Mainz (Germany). From 1997 to 2000 he pursued his graduate studies at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, in the group of Prof. Klaus Müllen. Then he worked as a consultant for Roland Berger Management Consultants in Munich (2001). In the years 2002 and 2003, he returned to academia as a postdoctoral fellow working on protein engineering with Prof. Don Hilvert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. In 2004, he was appointed as a head of a junior research group at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. From 2007 to 2017 he held a position as full professor at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he headed the chair for Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering. Since June 2017, he is scientific board member of the DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen, Germany, and fills a position as full professor at RWTH Aachen University for Macromolecular Materials and Systems. In 2018, he became vice-director of the DWI – Leibniz Institute and director in 2023.
报告内容：
Polymer mechanochemistry refers to the control of chemical transformations by rearranging or cleaving specific bonds at precisely defined sites within polymer chains upon applying mechanical forces such as tension and compression or indirectly by ultrasound.[1] The force-sensitive moieties responsible for this process are known as mechanophores.[2] While polymer mechanochemistry employing functional mechanophores has found widespread applications in the field of material science ranging from damage detection,[3] stress sensing,[4] to self-regulating materials,[5] its exploration and utilization in the biomedical context is still in an early stage. Here, we introduce 20 kHz ultrasound and high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) as a mechanical stimulus to drive the activation of disulfide mechanophores residing in hyperbranched star polymers and cross-linked microgels. Through the application of force, thiols are formed that undergo further reactions like addition to Diels-Alder products or thiol-disulfide exchange to release different drugs carrying furan or hydroxy groups, respectively.[6] Besides colloids from synthetic scaffolds, ultrasound-sensitive nucleic acid microgels will be presented. They are prepared by enzymatic processes involving rolling circle transcription or amplification. The sequences are designed in such a way that they encode multiple binding sites for small bioactives, proteins or oligonucleotides. Upon sonication with low intensity focused ultrasound or even imaging ultrasound, molecular cargoes are released by cleavage of non-covalent interactions. In this way, drug action and cellular activities are controlled spatiotemporally in vitro and in vivo.[7,8,9] Ultimately, we are aiming to establish ultrasound in combination with mechano-sensitive soft colloids and microbubbles as a tool in precision nanomedicine and sonogenetics.[10]
