PhD defense: Disraëli Kusmus Functional Modification of Polymeric Nanogels

Polymeric nanogels were synthesized from commercial reagents in a controlled crosslinking polymerization manner, yielding nanogels bearing an epoxide moiety in a single step. The nanogels were subsequently functionalized exploiting epoxide ring opening reactions with various nucleophiles resulting in a variety of versatile nanogels with tunable properties. Nanogels carrying a positively charged sulfonium moiety were complexed with plasmid DNA forming novel polyplexes. Lastly, these polyplexes were evaluated in gene transfection experiments on a variety of cell lines.