Development of injectable hydrogel platform based on hydrophilic thermosensitive linear-bottlebrush-linear triblock copolymers

Injectable hydrogels are desired in many biomedical applications due to their minimally invasive deployment to the body and their ability to release drugs. However, current injectables suffer from mechanical mismatch with tissue, fragility, water expulsion, and high viscosity. To address these issues, we designed novel brush-like macromolecules that concurrently provide softness, firmness, strength, fluidity, and swellability. The aim of the proposed experiment is to explore the correlations between the structure and thermal properties as well as changes in structure during swelling of injectable hydrogel platform based on hydrophilic thermosensitive linear-bottlebrush-linear (LBL) triblock copolymers that self-assemble at body temperature. The in-situ SAXS coupled with weighting and variable-temperature experiments will help us understanding the evolution of the microstructural organization and its correlation to the swellability properties and temperature.