Polymer-nanoparticle materials for prophylaxis : from passive immunity to wildfire prevention
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In order to broadly enable prophylactic strategies in fields spanning medicine to agriculture, there is a need for new carrier materials that can deliver active ingredients over extended timescales, while being easily manufactured and deployed. Because of their dynamic nature, physically crosslinked networks provide a route to meet these criteria. Among the many physical crosslink motifs, polymer-nanoparticle interactions stand out as a modular and simple way towards creating highly-scalable, multifunctional materials. In this work, I will first discuss the fundamental understanding we have developed on how our polymer-nanoparticle networks form viscoelastic materials. We showed that elasticity arises from overlap of polymer coronas that are adsorbed onto nanoparticles, which leads to bridging polymer chains as well as caging of local polymer-nanoparticle units. Furthermore, we found that contrary to traditionally used physical crosslinking motifs, polymer-nanoparticle interactions are entropy-driven and this difference manifested in temperature-independent mechanical properties. I will then describe how we used these networks to design hydrogels for long-term delivery of therapeutic antibodies for passive immunization. We explored combinations of cellulose derivatives and hydrophobic pendant modifications for the polymers that made the most robust and biocompatible hydrogels. From this screen, we identified the best hydrogel formulation and conducted in vivo release studies of a broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibody-like protein. These results demonstrated that our materials are able to extend the pharmacokinetics of antibody drugs and can potentially enable new prophylactic strategies. Lastly, we applied the design concepts developed from our passive immunization work to address the growing wildfire epidemic. Importantly, we identified that ignitions are localized in specific high-risk locales that are responsible for the majority of severe fires. Treating these small areas of high-risk land with fire retardant would prevent a large proportion of the worst fires, but current carrier materials do not retain the retardant on fuel through weathering. By engineering a sprayable viscoelastic carrier fluid, we demonstrated in pilot-scale and large-scale studies that we can provide season-long protection against wildfires.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yu, Anthony C |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Appel, Eric (Eric Andrew) |
| Thesis advisor | Appel, Eric (Eric Andrew) |
| Thesis advisor | Fuller, Gerald G |
| Thesis advisor | Heilshorn, Sarah |
| Degree committee member | Fuller, Gerald G |
| Degree committee member | Heilshorn, Sarah |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Materials Science and Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anthony C Yu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Anthony C Yu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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