Brigitte Voit

Brigitte Voit received her PhD in Macromolecular Chemistry 1990 from University Bayreuth, Germany. After postdoctoral work in 1991/1992 at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, USA, and pioneering work on hyperbranched polymers, she joined Technische Universität München. After habilitation on the topic of dendritic polymers in 1996, she was appointed 1997 full professor for “Organic Chemistry of Polymers“ at Technische Universität Dresden as well as head of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research (IPF) Dresden. From 2002 to 2022 she was also Scientific Director of IPF. At TU Dresden she is member of the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering (DIGS BB), and the DFG Graduate School Hydrogel-based Microsystem. She is active in the European Polymer Federation (president 2014/2015), elected member of acatech, and holder of the Staudinger Award.
Her scientific interest is in functional polymer architectures and responsive polymers for e.g. biomedicine, smart systems and organic electronics.

Responsive polymeric nanocapsules and multicompartments as cellular mimics

Polymeric micro- or nanocapsules and multicompartment systems are highly interesting in the field of nanoreactors and in mimicking biological systems and processes. Of special interest is the introduction of a stimuli-responsiveness into the capsule shell to be able to control the traffic of small and larger compounds and particles into and out from the capsule interior. We will report on robust, pH-responsive and multifunctional photocrosslinked polymersomes, which are interesting for studies in synthetic biology, but also for application as nanoreactors in microsystem devices and in nanotechnology. While pH sensitive polymersomes usually disassemble upon acidification, ours show a definite swelling, since the cross-linked membrane remains intact, and they allow pH-dependent diffusion of small molecules through the membrane. Thus, cascade enzyme reactions could be carried out under pH control using polymersome-encapsulated enzymes and specific features of organelles could be mimicked. In such pH-responsive and photo-crosslinked polymersomes various functions can be integrated e.g. additional light or redox responsiveness, and they can be decorated with various functionalities and bioactive biomacromolecules to achieve specific binding properties, targeting or therapeutic action. Larger proteinosomes (up to 50 micrometer), prepared by pickering emulsion from BSA-PNIPAAm bioconjugates, have been realized as synthetic cell wall, and those compartments have been equipped with the smaller pH-responsive polymersomes, mimicking organelle structures in a cell. Examples will be given how these multicompartments can be used to study complex cellular functions controlling cellular traffic.