MRL Room 2053
Speaker
Prof. Frank Bates
Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota
Dept. of Chemical Engineering, UCSB
Host
Prof. Glenn Fredrickson
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare genetic disorder that appears in about 3,600 newborn boys in the US annually. This progressive degenerative muscle disease leads to disability and death as the afflicted individual matures to adult age. My colleagues and I have discovered that a bottlebrush (BB) version of poly(ethylene oxide-b-propylene oxide) block copolymer, a variation on commercial compounds known as Poloxamers, has a remarkable effect on genetically modified DMD mice. These results will be discussed in the context of recent studies dealing with the interaction of Poloxamer triblock copolymers with model lipid bilayers and comparison with the new BB diblock compound.