Sweet polymers for medicine

Synthetic sugars offer great potential e.g. for the development of new treatments or vaccines. Thus chemists have been searching for new molecules offering the same biological activity that can be synthesized more easily. One important class of such mimetics are sugar polymers, a combination of polymer chains with natural sugars. In order to understand how such sugar polymers mimic the activity of natural sugars and how to more effectively synthesize such sugar polymers, a new class of monodisperse polymers is currently developed at the MPICI and tested for their properties.