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Publication Date

2022-05-08

First Advisor

Maren E. Buck

Document Type

Honors Project

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Chemistry

Keywords

polymer chemistry, protein-polymer conjugates

Abstract

Cancer has been a major public health concern worldwide, and cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. In 2021, cancer affects 1.9 million people in the United States. The current cancer treatments have serious side effects. Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy have side effects, including invasiveness, the death of healthy cells, and the utilization of harmful high-energy waves. In the past decades, protein-polymer conjugates have been widely used for applications in medicine, particularly as they can facilitate the targeted delivery of therapeutics to disease tissue, and therefore are promising compounds for site-specific drug delivery for targeted cancer treatments. The overall goal of this study is to synthesize thiol-reactive polymers for site-specific conjugation to proteins of interest in the context of drug delivery. In this study, poly(pentafluorophenyl acrylate) with maleimide side chains will be synthesized and will be conjugated to an engineered Fn3 model protein, derived from the 10th domain of fibronectin, containing a single cysteine residue. The single engineered cysteine residue at the site of interest on Fn3 allows better control of the location of the conjugated polymer. The thiol conjugation is hypothesized to have a high conjugation yield because thiols are the most nucleophilic functional group on native proteins and can be easily targeted with electrophiles, such as the alkene on maleimide.

Rights

©2022 Jiyun Zhang. Access limited to the Smith College community and other researchers while on campus. Smith College community members also may access from off-campus using a Smith College log-in. Other off-campus researchers may request a copy through Interlibrary Loan for personal use.

Language

English

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