Structural Engineering of l-Aspartic Amphiphilic Polyesters for Enzyme-Responsive Drug Delivery and Bioimaging in Cancer Cells.

Design and development of amphiphilic polyesters based on bioresources are very important to cater to the ever-growing need for biodegradable polymers in biomedical applications. Here, we report structural engineering of enzyme-responsive amphiphilic polyesters based on l-amino acid bioresources and study their drug delivery aspects in the cancer cell line. For this purpose, an l-aspartic acid-based polyester platform is chosen, and two noncovalent forces such as hydrogen bonding and side-chain hydrophobic interactions are introduced to study their effect on the aqueous self-assembly of nanoparticles.

Melt Polycondensation Strategy for Amide-Functionalized l-Aspartic Acid Amphiphilic Polyester Nano-assemblies and Enzyme-Responsive Drug Delivery in Cancer Cells.

Aliphatic polyesters are intrinsically enzymatic-biodegradable, and there is ever-increasing demand for safe and smart next-generation biomaterials including drug delivery nano-vectors in cancer research. Using bioresource-based biodegradable polyesters is one of the elegant strategies to meet this requirement; here, we report an l-amino acid-based amide-functionalized polyester platform and explore their lysosomal enzymatic biodegradation aspects to administrate anticancer drugs in cancer cells. l-Aspartic acid was chosen and different amide-side chain-functionalized di-ester monomers were tailor-made having aromatic, aliphatic, and bio-source pendant units.