A University of Queensland researcher is challenging the view “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” in the world of many everyday products – and in the process has won a prestigious UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award.
Dr Michael Monteiro, a polymer chemist with UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), is developing a more effective, economical and environmentally friendly way to make complex polymer architectures that will have greater functionality and structural design than any other structure previously made.
The aim of his work is to prepare these architectures on the nanoscale with the same precision, complexity and variety as that of small molecules.
Dr Monteiro’s work will not only improve the properties of common products but will have applications in the emerging world of biomedicine.
“In the past there was little control of the polymer architecture and many polymer types and combinations would be trialled until the properties were found to work for an application,” Dr Monteiro said.
“To get better properties this process would be repeated.
“What we are doing is a paradigm shift away from a trial and error approach to a more scientific and pragmatic approach where we can engineer structures for individual purposes.
This reduces the number of steps required to develop these structures, which has the potential to significantly reduce production costs.”
He said while the work is a complicated and involved process, his aim is to produce purpose-built polymers that can be produced in commercial quantities.
“We are at the infancy of this technology but the possibilities of having synthetic polymers with well-defined structures and functionality are amazing,” he said.
He said while commercial applications of this type of work were slowly being implemented in bulk commodities like paints and scratch resistant coatings for cars, the greatest impact would be in the biotechnology fields such as in vaccine and drug design and delivery.
He is collaborating with Professor Istvan Toth, from the School of Pharmacy, and other world class researchers from the AIBN who are looking at novel ways of drug delivery and purpose built polymeric nanoparticles would be an invaluable addition.
Dr Monteiro received his doctorate from Griffith University in 1995 and has worked extensively overseas including The Netherlands and Canada where he worked with Professor Ken O’Driscoll, regarded as the father of free radical polymer chemistry.
This year he was awarded the prestigious Australian Research Council QEII Fellowship and subsequently received the JG Russell Award from the Australian Academy of Sciences.
The UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award will provide seed funding to develop methodologies to synthesise complex architectures from polymeric units with uniform chain length and predetermined functionality.
Media: For more information contact Dr Michael Monteiro (telephone 07 3365 3838) or Andrew Dunne at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2802). Videos and still photos are available at www.uq.edu.au/news/researchweek
