Sustainable Polymer Chemistry and Colloid Science
Our review article on nanoparticles that show multi-stimuli-responsive aggregation behaviour is now online in Nanoscale. This article came out of Luke Johnson’s MSc student’s project, with support from Dom and Edyta carried out during the lockdown. I think that this is a great output (especially under the circumstances) and is credit to the work from Luke, Dom and Edyta.
The article is available here.
Congratulations to Nancy who has completed her PhD! Her examiners were Dr Ben Newland from Cardiff University and Dr Gemma Nixon from the University of Liverpool.
Her thesis on “Stimuli-Responsive Multi-layered Nanocarriers for Oral Drug Delivery to Treat Colon Cancer” has resulted in one published paper with another currently under review. Further papers are currently being drafted. Nancy is currently looking for PDRA opportunities.
We are really excited to have been awarded £965k by the NERC to provide the necessary technological advancements to take forward the use of post-consumer recycled (PCR) resin, which can be made by recycling High Density Polyethylene (HDPE), one of the most common plastics used in packaging. The other academic members of the team on this project are Dr Tom Hasell, Dr Frédéric Blanc and Dr Andy McLauchlin, Dr Vitaliy Kurlin, Professor Andrew Lyons, Dr Gopalakrishnan Narayanamurthy and Professor Mike Shaver at the University of Manchester.
The link to the press release is here
In this work, Jess investigated the effect of the structure of poloxamer stabilisers on the polarity inside solid lipid nanoparticles. This understanding will assist the selection of stabilisers and may potentially allow increased drug loading in solid lipid nanoparticles. See the full article here.
In this paper, Edyta shows how asymmetric-flow field-flow fractionation can be used to characterise the internal structure of nanogels. See the full article here.
Her work investigates the development of lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles for the delivery of HIV drugs. She shows that the lipid coating on nanoparticles plays an important role in improving biological uptake. See online here.
As part of our project with Unilever, Andy McLauchlin is joining the group as a PDRA working on investigating the properties of post consumer resin.
This project aims to develop a novel packaging solution for the Domestos brand bleach product that includes a higher percentage (>70%) of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic in [High density polyethylene ] (HDPE) bottles.
Official release here.
Congratulations to Edyta for passing her PhD viva with minor corrections!
Her work investigates the use of layer-by-layer modification of nanoparticles to achieve stimuli responsive drug release. See online here.
