A catalytic approach to peptide-polymer hybrids

Peptide-based therapeutics and biomaterials continue to attract considerable attention worldwide. Problems associated with their poor in vivo stability, bioavailability and challenging syntheses necessitates the use of chemical engineering to design and synthesise novel peptidomimetics possessing improved physicochemical properties. The use of chemistry thus provides exquisite opportunities to enhance natural peptide designs to generate ideal pharmaceutical targets with high specificity, low toxicity and excellent potency towards receptors. Our interest in homogeneous catalysis led to examine a method for generating structurally well-defined protein-polymer hybrids for application in the field of peptidomimetics. This thesis focused on the development of a novel and generic metathesis-driven polymerisation method for linking multiple copies of a peptide sequence with directional NC ligation throughout the entire biopolymer.