Biopolymers

Heparin has promising potential in drug delivery due to its excellent biocompatibility and abundant modification sites. It can not only incorporate polymer chains via its functional groups such as hydroxyl, amine and carboxyl, but load cationic moieties via static interaction. Thus, heparin was considered as a versatile platform to design and prepare various self-assembly for drug delivery applications. For example, polycaprolactone(PCL) and paclitaxel(PTX) were covalently incorporated into heparin to form two conjugates respectively in our previous work. Both can self-assemble into micelle in water and be used as multifunctional drug carrier with tumor targeting ability and pH sensitive drug release behavior. However, the complicated and tedious synthetic route suffered the preparation and restricted further application. Thus, a simple and feasible strategy(Fig.1) was carried out in this study to prepare heparin based self-assembly via non-covalent interaction. This strategy is able to well control the morphology and the size of heparin based self-assembly so that the self-assembly can be applied as smart multifunctional drug carrier.