Sorption and Diffusion of Ionic Chemotherapy Drugs in Charged Biosponge Block Copolymer Membranes

Cancer is the leading cause of death in most developed nations. Despite the effort to develop targeted and personalized chemotherapy drugs, >90% of the injected chemotherapy drug is not trapped by a target organ, goes to the heart, and circulates throughout the body. To overcome the current limitations in chemotherapy, we designed biosponge adsorbers that can capture target ionic chemotherapy drugs in the body. In this presentation, we discuss the transport mechanism of ionic chemotherapy drug in charged block copolymer membranes with different ion-exchange capacities (IECs) and equilibrium water swelling. Sulfonated stryrenic pentablock copolymers are used as a model polymer, and doxorubicin (dox) is used as a model drug. We conducted a cycle of sorption and desorption experiments to quantify the amount of sorbed-dox, free-dox and bound-dox in the polymers. We correlated our macroscopic sorption and diffusion behavior of the drug with polymer chemistry and morphology. Upon this work, our goal is to understand the design principles of charged biosponge polymers for different ionic chemotherapy drugs. Designing highly-selective biosponge polymer adsorbers can effectively remove untrapped chemotherapy drugs in the body for efficient cancer treatment.