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Phenol is the toxicant present in cigarette smoke that causes pulmonary diseases, eyes infection, and even various kinds of cancer. So, in this research, an attempt was done to prepare a suitable absorbent to remove phenol from cigarette smoke. A novel bio-based adsorbent succinylated carboxymethyl starch (S-CMS) was prepared by reacting carboxymethyl starch (CMS) with succinic anhydride (SA) in the presenting of N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF) solvent and pyridine. The structure of the S-CMS was confirmed by spectroscopic techniques including proton nuclear magnetic resonance and Fourier transform infrared. The S-CMS crystallinity and thermal properties were checked by x-ray diffraction and thermogravimetric analysis. The results showed a decrease in thermal properties and crystallinity for S-CMS. The S-CMS were tested as adsorbents for the removal of phenol. The adsorption efficiencies of CMS, S-CMS1, S-CMS2, and S-CMS3 towards phenol were shown to be 0.297 g/g, 0.321 g/g, 0.322 g/g, and 0.324 g/g, respectively.

Self-assembled polymer vesicles have emerged as exciting and promising materials for their potential application in drug delivery, but the dynamics of stimuli-responsive polymers in these areas with pendant functionality in order to understand the structure-property relationship under different physicochemical conditions is still open to discussion. In this work, nitroxide radical-containing copolymers were synthesized and utilized to investigate local dynamics in their vesicular assemblies. Herein, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy was applied to reveal the smart supramolecular vesicular structure and polymer chain dynamics in stimuli-responsive controlled assemblies by considering molecular-level interactions. These interactions and dynamics were dependent on the microenvironment of the assemblies, which might be affected by physicochemical parameters such as radical concentration, pH, redox agent, polarity, and viscosity. These observations help to accomplish quantitative insights into the stimuli-responsive colloidal vesicular assemblies. The vesicles were used as an anticancer drug carrier, which showed high drug loading efficiency (63.65%). The reduction-responsive prompt disassembly accelerated the release. Furthermore, the biocompatibility and anticancer activity were examined by cellular experiments against normal fibroblasts (L929) and human cervical cancer (HeLa) cell lines, respectively. The results demonstrate that this effort provides an easy strategy for designing controllable stimuli-responsive polymer nanosystems which promotes their promising application in cancer treatment.

Diabetes mellitus is an intractable chronic disease manifested as high blood glucose levels (BGLs) accompanied by a series of complications. Exogenous insulin supplement is essential for both type I and advanced type II diabetics to manage blood glucose in their daily life. Thus insulin delivery has become a hot research topic and a lot of effort has been witnessed on the development of insulin delivery methods. Being like artificial pancreases, smart glucose-responsive insulin delivery systems that are able to automatically release insulin on-demanded according to the real-time BGLs are considered to be ideal alternatives to damaged islets and have significant potential for diabetes treatment. Therefore, this review is aimed to summarize the recent advances in the smart glucose-responsive insulin delivery systems, including microscopic or macroscopic systems based on the glucose oxidase (GOx), phenylboronic acid (PBA) and concanavalin A (Con A). From the point of view of materials science and engineering, preparation, properties and glucose response mechanism of different systems are introduced. Their advantages, challenges and opportunities are also discussed.