ChE Professor You-Yeon Won receives NSF funding to study pharmaceutical polymers

Davidson School of Chemical Engineering Professor You-Yeon Won has been awarded three years of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study pharmaceutical polymers. The NSF funding will support Won’s research project, Statistically Sequence-Controlled Pharmaceutical Polymers, and Studies of Their Molecular Thermodynamics and Kinetic Properties.

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Dr. You-Yeon Won, Professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, has been awarded NSF funding for his research on pharmaceutical polymers. (Purdue University/Alin Mesaros)

Davidson School of Chemical Engineering Professor You-Yeon Won has been awarded three years of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study pharmaceutical polymers.

The NSF funding will support Won’s research project, Statistically Sequence-Controlled Pharmaceutical Polymers, and Studies of Their Molecular Thermodynamics and Kinetic Properties.

“Aliphatic copolyesters, such as poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) or PLGA, represent the most prevalent type of drug delivery vehicle in use today,” explains Won. “There are, for instance, about 20 commercialized drug products in which PLGA is used as an excipient.”

Won says this NSF project will tackle a problem that has gone almost unnoticed over the past 40 years of utilization of copolyesters in controlled drug delivery systems—the use of monomer sequence distribution to control pharmacokinetic behaviors.

The NSF award totals almost $400,000, and funding will run through August 2021.