Facile synthesis of biodegradable and clickable polymer

Abstract

Biodegradable polymers have been used in environmental and biomedical engineering, but the lack of functional groups limits their applications. In the present work, we report a facile approach to synthesize a biodegradable and clickable polymer consisting of ε-caprolactone (CL) and allyl methacrylate (AMA) with phosphazene base as the catalyst via hybrid copolymerization, where AMA is selectively copolymerized leaving the allylic groups for the click reaction. The facile and efficient approach can be used to functionalize biodegradable polymers and synthesize some new polymers under mild conditions.