Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Peptides are a quickly growing drug class, which continue to garner attention in pharmaceutical research due to their applications in the treatment of a variety of diseases. The major challenge when working with these drugs is that they degrade quickly in vivo and have poor membrane permeability. This makes simple administration methods such as oral consumption infeasible and necessitates the use of a localized drug delivery system. One example of such a system is to load the peptide into biodegradable polymer microspheres which can then be injected close to the intended delivery site of the drug. These microspheres provide a sustained release of the peptide, before eventually degrading and being removed by the body. This is done commercially by a polymer called poly(lactide-co-glycolide), or PLGA. However, PLGA breaks down in the body to form highly acidic byproducts, which can react with the peptide drug and alter the drug’s chemistry. Depending on the peptide, this can lead to reduced effectiveness or inactivation. Recent work in the Amsden Group has found that polymer microspheres based on poly(trimethylene carbonate) (PTMC) show great promise for this application, as the degradation byproducts are far less acidic. The proposed research focuses on developing innovative new polymer microspheres based on PTMC for the sustained delivery of peptide drugs.