(638g) Invited: Engineering Macromolecular Oligotea Conjugates for Biological Applications

As new sequence-defined macromolecular class, oligothioetheramides (oligoTEAs) are uniquely suited to design and create therapeutic drugs and delivery scaffolds due to their rapid synthetic assembly with precise sequence-control, relatively inexpensive production costs, and a massive scope of chemically diverse monomers. Moreover, their abiotic backbone renders them resistant to proteolysis. My group has used this versatile synthetic macromolecular platform to i) create well-defined antimicrobial polymers with potent activity against a variety of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, ii) create intracellular fluorescent target specific probes for measuring intracellular bond cleavage rates, iii) create sequence-specific antibody-drug conjugates, and iv) discover cell penetrating oligomers for intracellular antibiotic delivery. In this talk, I will briefly discuss the synthesis and rationale behind the use of oligoTEAs and our work on the use of oligoTEAs to create cell-penetrating oligomers and sequence-specific antibody-drug conjugates for intracellular drug delivery.