High-gravity technology intensified Knoevenagel condensation-Michael addition polymerization of poly (ethylene glycol)-poly (n-butyl cyanoacrylate) for blood-brain barrier delivery

Poly(ethylene glycol)-poly(n-butyl cyanoacrylate)(PEG-PBCA)is a remarkable drug delivery carrier for permeating blood-brain barrier.In this work,a novel high-gravity procedure was reported to intensify Knoevenagel condensation-Michael addition polymerization of PEG-PBCA.A series of PEG-PBCA containing different block ratios were synthesized with narrow molecular weight distribution of polydispersity indexes less than 1.1.Furthermore,the reaction time reduced 60%compared to conventional stirred tank reactor process.Chemical structures of as-prepared polymers were characterized.In vitro drug delivery performance was evaluated.The cytotoxicity of PEG-PBCA to brain microvessel endothelial cells(BMVEC)decreases with the extension of the PEG chain and the shortening of the PBCA chain.The polymer cellular uptake to BMVECs was better after improving hydrophilicity by PEG block.Results of bloodbrain barrier permeability demonstrated that medium length of PBCA chain and short PEG chain are favorable for hydrophobic Nile red permeation,while long PEG chain and short PBCA chain are beneficial to delivery water-soluble doxorubicin hydrochloride(Dox).The average apparent permeability coeffi-cient increased 1.7 and 0.25 times than that of raw Nile red and Dox,respectively.High-gravity intensi-fied condensation polymerization should have great potential in brain drug delivery system.

An A-D-A′-D-A type unfused nonfullerene acceptor for organic solar cells with approaching 14%efficiency

In recent years,power conversion efficiency(PCE)of organic solar cells(OSCs)has made significant improvement.A large number of studies were reported to achieve high PCEs through exploring new active layer materials,especially the high efficiency fused ring acceptors(FRAs).Compared with FRAs,another type of so-called unfused-ring acceptors(UFAs),possessing some advantages such as simple synthesis and low cost,have attracted a lot of attention.Herein,a new UFA BTzO-4F,incorporating with a benzotriazole moiety and S···O intramolecular noncovalent interactions,has been successfully synthesized.The photovoltaic device based on PBDB-T:BTzO-4F achieved a record PCE of 13.8%for UFAs,which indicates that introducing the benzotriazole moiety is an effective strategy for high quality acceptors.Thus,these findings of this work demonstrate the great potential of UFAs for high performance OSCs.

Low-cost polymer acceptors with noncovalently fused-ring backbones for efficient all-polymer solar cells

The polymerization of fused-ring acceptors(FRAs) to afford their corresponding polymeric acceptors for high-performance all-polymer solar cells(all-PSCs) has achieved remarkable progress in the past few years.However,due to the high degree of synthetic complexity for the monomer,the high-cost of these polymeric acceptors may limit their commercial applications.Thus,it is urgent to develop inexpensive and high-performance polymeric acceptors for all-PSCs.Herein,two novel polymeric acceptors(PBTzO and PBTzO-2F) have been designed and synthesized by copolymerization of noncovalently fused ring acceptors(NFRAs),which were employed in all-PSCs for the first time.Upon introducing the “noncovalently conformational locks(NoCLs)” in the backbone and selective fluorination of the end-group,photophysical and electrical properties,and solidstate packing properties of the NFRAs have been rationally tuned.As a result,the PBDB-T:PBTzO-2F based devices presented an excellent power conversion efficiency(PCE) of 11.04%,much higher than that of PBTzO based ones due to the increased charge generation and extraction,improved hole transfer and carrier mobilities,and reduced energy loss.More importantly,PBTzO-2F exhibited a much lower synthetic complexity(SC) index and higher figure-of-merit(FOM) values than the high-performance fused-ring acceptor based polymer acceptors(FRA-PAs) due to the simpler structures and more effective synthesis.This contribution provided a novel idea to achieve low-cost and high-performance all-PSCs.