Direct Synthesis of Polymer Nanocapsules with a Noncovalently Tailorable Surface

摘要

Nanometer-sized hollow polymer spheres or polymer nanocapsules are important for a wide range of applications including drug delivery, encapsulation, and imaging. Several methods to synthesize such polymer nanocapsules have been reported, such as template synthesis, self-assembly, emulsion polymerization, and core removal of dendrimers. Although each of these has its own merits, they all need either a preorganized structure or template to shape a hollow shell structure, and furthermore they require time-consuming and laborious multistep processes including removal of the core or templates, repeated centrifugation or filtration, cross-linking of specially designed vesicular species, or separation of large quantities of surfactants.