Superelastic and pH-Responsive Degradable Dendrimer Cryogels Prepared by Cryo-aza-Michael Addition Reaction

Authors

Juan Wang, Virginia Commonwealth University
Hu Yang, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2018

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

8:7155

First Page

1

Last Page

10

DOI

10.1038/s41598-018-25456-y

Comments

Originally published at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-25456-y

Funded in part by the VCU Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.

Date of Submission

October 2019

Abstract

Dendrimers exhibit super atomistic features by virtue of their well-defined discrete quantized nanoscale structures. Here, we show that hyperbranched amine-terminated polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimer G4.0 reacts with linear polyethylene glycol (PEG) diacrylate (575 g/mol) via the aza-Michael addition reaction at a subzero temperature (−20 °C), namely cryo-aza-Michael addition, to form a macroporous superelastic network, i.e., dendrimer cryogel. Dendrimer cryogels exhibit biologically relevant Young’s modulus, high compression elasticity and super resilience at ambient temperature. Furthermore, the dendrimer cryogels exhibit excellent rebound performance and do not show significant stress relaxation under cyclic deformation over a wide temperature range (−80 to 100 °C). The obtained dendrimer cryogels are stable at acidic pH but degrade quickly at physiological pH through self-triggered degradation. Taken together, dendrimer cryogels represent a new class of scaffolds with properties suitable for biomedical applications.

Rights

Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Is Part Of

VCU Chemical and Life Science Engineering Publications