Dr Helen Willcock of the University’s Department of Materials will lead on the project which is part of a government funded initiative to boost fundamental research in science and technology.

This project, one of 100 announced to receive a share of £80million as part of the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) initiative, is focused on delivering suitable shells for polymer nanoparticles.

The award will enable Dr Willcock, alongside Dr Martin Greenall of the University of Lincoln to explore how such shells interact with their environments. Making it possible to predict how the particles’ surfaces will behave, this research will aid design of safe, effective smart polymer nanoparticles, for use in drug delivery and medical imaging.

Dr Willcock, who’s a Senior Lecturer at the University, says it’s important research: “Polymer particles are used in a wide variety of applications where it's important to control their size and their surface chemistry, because what's on the outside of the particle is the thing that dictates how it interacts with its environment. Currently, what's not thoroughly understood is how the responsive particle’s core and shell interact when in different environments – we can’t predict what the surface of a particle will look like when the core reacts to certain stimuli, so this is what we’ll look at trying to understand further in this research.

“The ability to predict what a particle is going to do is deeply important across a variety of applications areas. For instance, we often use polymer particles in drug delivery to protect the drugs and deliver them to a specific area. When we have responsive polymers, we might end up with a change in the surface chemistry which impacts how the polymer particles can be trafficked intracellularly. This could lead to a particle, that used to just go around in the blood and not really affect anything, to turn toxic, how it interacts with proteins in the body, changing the rate that it is excreted from the body - and they can be huge problems.

“I would say the current attitude amongst polymer chemists is very much one that sees us make a range of particles with different structures and compositions to see which fits best, but that’s a hugely inefficient way of working. It's not a good way to do anything because you're changing several factors when one of them might be key to the application. If you could predict a behaviour and target it in the first place you could get a much more efficient synthetic system going.”

Speaking more widely on the government initiative, Science Minister, Lord Patrick Vallance, said: “We are backing 100 ambitious projects up and down the UK which could spark the beginning of a new generation of life-changing developments. It is vital we support bright researchers to explore a new generation of discoveries."

Professor Charlotte Deane, EPSRC’s Executive Chair, said: “Discovery science is the bedrock of innovation, feeding the pipeline of progress critical to prosperity, sustainability, security, competitiveness, quality of life and resilience to future challenges. It’s always been a UK strength and EPSRC has always been at the forefront of maintaining and extending this national capability. Utilising and enhancing expertise across the country, these new EPSRC-backed projects will generate a legacy of extraordinary new knowledge, with impacts felt across the UK and the globe.”