Water Soluble Polymers for Medicine

A number of general reviews have already been published on this topic and so the authors will present information on their approach and some results obtained. Polymers for medical uses are a traditional field at the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry. However, crosslinked hydrophilic polymers ‐ so called hydrogels ‐ were the prevailing object in the past. Either as soft highly swollen materials for prothesis ‐ like soft contact lenses ‐ or heavily crosslinked macroporous beads designed as special sorbents or carriers of biologically active groups. Only a few years ago a research programme on soluble polymers was focussed mainly on general problems. The overall view about the main directions of the authors research is schematically presented on Fig. 1. It also shows the two types of polymers the authors are using in their experiments. The first one poly[N(2‐hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide] 3a was chosen from the set of N‐substituted acryl‐and methacrylamides 4 because of simple preparation and purification of the monomer. The other is a polyamide (polypeptide) described by Neri et al. in 1973. 5 It is more hydrophilic and provides a good possibility to prepare a whole set of derivatives from a common polymeric intermediate ‐ polysuccinimide.