Theranostic nanogels: multifunctional agents for simultaneous therapeutic delivery and diagnostic imaging.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in multifunctional theranostic agents capable of delivering therapeutic payloads while facilitating simultaneous diagnostic imaging of diseased sites. This approach offers a comprehensive strategy particularly valuable in dynamically evolving diseases like cancer, where combining therapy and diagnostics provides crucial insights for treatment planning. Nanoscale platforms, specifically nanogels, have emerged as promising candidates due to their stability, tunability, and multifunctionality as carriers.

Structural Determinants of Stimuli-Responsiveness in Amphiphilic Macromolecular Nano-assemblies.

Stimuli-responsive nano-assemblies from amphiphilic macromolecules could undergo controlled structural transformations and generate diverse macroscopic phenomenon under stimuli. Due to the controllable responsiveness, they have been applied for broad material and biomedical applications, such as biologics delivery, sensing, imaging, and catalysis. Understanding the mechanisms of the assembly-disassembly processes and structural determinants behind the responsive properties is fundamentally important for designing the next generation of nano-assemblies with programmable responsiveness.

pH-Responsive nanofiber buttresses as local drug delivery devices.

Electrospun nanofibers are a 3D scaffold of choice for many drug delivery devices due to their high surface area, significant capacity for drug payload, ease of placement, and scalable manufacture. Herein, we report the synthesis of polymeric, pH-responsive nanofiber buttresses electrospinning. The homopolymer is comprised of an acrylic backbone with acid-sensitive, hydrolyzable, trimethoxybenzaldehyde-protected side chains that lead to buttress transformation from a hydrophobic to a hydrophilic state under physiologically relevant pH conditions (, extracellular tumor environment with pH = 6.