New strategies for polymer development in pharmaceutical science - a shortreview

We are developing synthetic polymers for pharmaceutical and medical applica tions. These applications can be broadly grouped on how the polymer will be utilized e.g. material, excipient or molecule. Our focus is to develop pol ymers with more defined structures that are based on biological, physicoche mical and/or materials criteria. Strategies are being developed to more eff iciently optimize structure-property correlations during preclinical develo pment. We describe two examples of our research on pharmaceutical polymer d evelopment: narrow molecular weight distribution (MWD) homopolymeric precur sors which can be functionalized to give families of narrow MWD homo- and c o-polymers, and hydrolytically degradable polymers.