Functional Polymer Microspheres by Type II Photoinitiated Precipitation Polymerization

From drug delivery to chromatography, functional polymer microspheres (FPMs) have found tremendous applications in materials science. However, the methods for producing them have several drawbacks, limiting their applications. For instance, to introduce pyridine functionality into the poly(divinylbenzene) microspheres, a 4-vinyl pyridine monomer is readily available and can be used during the copolymerization step (Method #1). Nevertheless, the number of available functional monomers (FMs) is limited, and the vast majority of the functionalities (e.g., morpholine, piperazine, and piperidine, etc.) lack their corresponding FMs. The second method for FPM synthesis is the post-modification of the polymer microspheres (PMs), and it requires at least two or more steps for functionalization, bringing extra cost and time for their production...

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