Polymer Chemistry Blog

Cameron Alexander received degrees (BSc and PhD) in Chemistry from the University of Durham, UK, and carried out post-doctoral research at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, University of Cambridge. He took up an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship before moving to the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham in June 2005. Professor Alexander was promoted to a personal Chair in Polymer Therapeutics at Nottingham in 2009, where he is also Head of the Division of Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering, and Operations Director of the EPSRC/AstraZeneca/University of Nottingham Doctoral Training Centre in Targeted Therapeutics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Materials Chemistry, and has published more than 100 refereed articles. Research in his group centres on the synthesis of responsive/‘smart’ materials for biomedical applications. Professor Alexander is currently an EPSRC Leadership Fellow (2009-2014) in the area of personalised medicines.

Please follow the link for further information on Cameron’s research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

I have always been fascinated by science, but have also always felt that practical value and application are important, hence the study of chemistry and my subsequent move into polymers and pharmaceutical materials. As is no doubt the case with many career scientists I was lucky to have great chemistry teachers and mentors throughout my career, from school, through an industry gap year with Ciba-Geigy, then at university in Durham and on to my current position at Nottingham. In chemistry and related disciplines, you have a chance to be creative, work with a whole range of amazing people and ideally, do something that is of value to others. We try to inspire in turn, and again I have been lucky to be part of Brady Haran’s fantastic Test-Tube project at Nottingham (see http://www.test-tube.org.uk/). The Periodic Table videos he has done with Martyn Poliakoff, Pete Licence and others are an inspiration in themselves.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C1PY00128K)

In a School of Pharmacy we combine fundamental and applied science interests, and modifying the properties of natural materials with polymers fits into both categories. In addition to their intended roles in biology, many biopolymers, and especially proteins, might act as powerful drugs but they are often too easily degraded to be used in a standard injectable formulation. Decorating proteins with polymers can enhance their stability as well as increase their circulation time in the body, but also can reduce their intended activity too. By attaching polymers that can collapse or expand dependent on a stimulus, we intend to keep the enhanced stability of the polymer-protein conjugate, but switch the enzyme back to a highly active state when needed by collapsing the attached polymer. Here we developed methods to modify trypsin, a well-known protease, but in ways that allowed the chemistries to be done entirely in aqueous media, and with polymer architectures that allowed us to play with the way the polymer-trypsin conjugate assembled in solution. In turn, this allowed us to direct the activity of the enzyme – though of course not to the extent that we intended!

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

In part it was because it was a Themed Issue but also because the journal is becoming the go-to site for the polymer science that most overlaps with what we are doing. The Editorial Board are all strongly involved in the more multidisciplinary aspects of polymer science, so it makes sense for us to send our papers to Polym. Chem. as, if we get past the reviewers, the science will be very visible.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

I will be at the Materials Chemistry 10 Conference (Manchester, July 2010), the UK PharmSci meeting (Nottingham, September 2011) and the International Symposium on Stimuli-Responsive Materials (Hattiesburg, Mississippi) in October 2011 talking about responsive polymers.

How do you spend your spare time?

Pre-children days my spare time involved mountain walks, trying to play drums and a bit of volunteering for Amnesty International but now the realities of combining science with young(ish) children means the concept of spare time is pretty nebulous. However, I do manage the occasional attempt at playing squash and plan to hit a drum kit badly for the amusement or otherwise of delegates at next year’s Warwick Polymer meeting.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

Mountain guide in Scotland – no contest.

Patrick Theato studied chemistry at the University of Mainz (Germany) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA), and obtained his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. R. Zentel at the University of Mainz in 2001. In 2002, he was awarded a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation and joined the group of Prof. D.Y. Yoon at Seoul National University (Korea), where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow, followed by a short research stay at Stanford University (USA) with Prof C.W. Frank. In 2003, he joined the University of Mainz as a young faculty member and completed his Habilitation in 2007. Since 2009 he holds a joint appointment with the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University within the World Class University (WCU) program. In 2011 he accepted a prize senior lectureship at the University of Sheffield (UK). Shortly after he moved to University of Hamburg (Germany), accepting a tenured associate professorship for polymer chemistry. His current research interests include the defined synthesis of reactive polymers, block copolymers, design of multi stimuli-responsive polymers, versatile functionalization of interfaces, hybrid polymers, polymers for electronics and templating of polymers.

Please follow the link to get more information about Patrick’s research group and his recent paper in Polymer Chemistry.

What was your inspiration in becoming a chemist?

Chemistry was my first love. Probably as every student, I was captivated by the fact that chemistry comes with a big bang and a lot of smoke. Who doesn’t remember his first explosion (those planned and those that happened surprisingly)? Seriously, from the first day on in middle school, I was fascinated by the art of creating something on a molecular level. Even though the concept of “molecular level” did not reveal itself to me during those early days. Besides, I was fond of the logic behind this art. The happy marriage of art and crafts-work is what I call chemistry and this motivates me even today.

What was the motivation behind the research in your recent Polymer Chemistry paper? (DOI: 10.1039/C0PY00314J)

Oh, I like this paper very much! It represents our very first approach of taking our expertise in post-polymerization modification chemistry, which we have mastered previously on the molecular level, to construct nanometer-sized objects. When it comes to nanoobjects, most approaches presented in the literature focus on the chemistry first and then utilize “self-assembly” of the building blocks into the desired nanoobject. We took the other way around. We first focused on the creation of the nanoobject (in the present case utilizing a templating approach) and then applied our post-polymerization modification strategies to dial-in the desired chemistry of the nanoobject. As we can control the dimensions and the chemical functionality of the nanoobject independently, it allows us to take the concepts from the synthesis of single polymer chains to the level of nanoobjects.

Why did you choose Polymer Chemistry to publish your work?

Polymer Chemistry was launched very recently, and I have to admit that I was rather skeptical at first about yet another journal. But once you look at the contents of the journal in more detail, you will realize that the journal indeed fills a gap that existed for a long time. The chance to concentrate on pure synthetic polymer chemistry is thrilling and an aspect that hardly any other high impact journal offers. I am convinced that it will be one of the top journals when it comes to polymer synthesis. Therefore it was a logical choice for our synthetic paper.

In which upcoming conferences may our readers meet you?

There are plenty of chances to meet me. Probably too many! [“laughs”]

The next conferences are Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition in Montreal, Canada, the Gordon Research Conference for Polymers in South Hadley, USA, the ACS Fall meeting in Denver, USA, the 12^th Pacific Polymer Conference on Jeju, Korea, and a couple of more small meetings. But readers may always feel free to contact me by email.

How do you spend your spare times?

Spare time? What is that? The rare moments of spare time I enjoy being with my family, travelling, cooking (interestingly, most chemists are good cooks) or fidgeting something on my computer.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

Either being a comedian, a computer scientist or in any other way being a happy person.