Star-shaped unimolecular micelles, tuning the host abilities: from hydrophobic to hydrophilic guest molecules

The host-guest abilities of core-shell architectures has been successfully applied in various areas such as, drug delivery, stimuli responsive release, catalysis or phase transfer. For all these purposes and esp. for biomedical applications well defined structures are required. Polymeric systems with core-shell architecture can posses well-defined structure, unimol. micellar properties, high loading capacities and do not require a complex multistep synthesis and are therefore accessible in larger scale. Our preliminary results showed that different model guest mols., either hydrophilic or hydrophobic, could be encapsulated and transported by the appropriate star-shaped polymeric host with a hydrophilic or hydrophobic core. The size of the outer shell does not influence the encapsulation abilities, but it is responsible for the soly. of the host-guest systems in the aq./org. phases, preventing the polymer aggregation. [on SciFinder (R)]