Porous design of molecularly imprinted polymers for improved drug loading and organized release properties

Abstract: Molecular imprinting materials can successfully improve the efficacy and safety of drugs, thus showing good potential in the field of drug delivery. However, some difficulties in imprinted materials, such as the deep embedding of imprinting sites and poor accessibility, limit their application. Herein, we have developed porous designed molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) based on cleavage hyperbranched polymers for thiamine hydrochloride controlled release. By introducing hyperbranched polymers with terminal double bonds and sensitive disulfide bonds, the resulting porous MIPs (PMIPs) can expose more effective recognition sites and improve the drug-controlled release behavior, where significantly improved the drug loading (101.25 mg g⁻¹) compared with the porous non-imprinted polymers (PNIPs, 16.57 mg g⁻¹). Moreover, under the optimized conditions of pH 1.7 and 25 °C, the whole drug release time was increased from 16 h (PNIPs) to 32 h (PMIPs). As a result, this porous structure of MIPs designed approach provides an insight to fabricating improved imprinted constituents with higher adsorption capacity and faster recognition kinetics, which not only inspires more brilliant work in the future but also paves the way for the application of MIPs in the field of drug delivery. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].