Isocyanates serve as important and versatile chemical intermediates in the manufacture of diverse products ranging from flexible and rigid polyurethane foams to agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. The production of isocyanates today draws mainly from petrochemical raw materials, including benzene, toluene, propylene, and aniline, and they are produced industrially using phosgenation of alkyl or aromatic amines. This involves highly toxic phosgene and produces corrosive HCl, limiting synthetic applications.

Although a wide variety of hydrogels have been developed for a multitude of uses, various functional characteristics have been hard to capture in a controllable manner. A significant feature is the ability to ‘tune’ the gel so its gelling time can be controlled in a manner suitable to its application. In this disclosure, because the gel is both tunable and its composition allows it to bond to tissue, the inventors believe it can be used to address an unmet medical need – the formation of adhesions after cardiac surgery. Current methods used are either drug therapy or various physical barriers but their success is limited.

A large sector with potential for improvement is the polyurethane industry, which produces versatile polymers and foams for use in many commercial products. Production of these polymers is dependent on precursor polyols. Current production of industrial polyols is dominated by petroleum-derived polyethers, which is unsustainable and presents environmental hazards due to their poor degradation in the environment.

Piezoelectric sensors have long existed to monitor applied pressures between two objects. In large applications with malleable substrates or where low cost is key, individual piezoelectric sensors are not practical. A variety of applications exist where monitoring the pressure being applied to a soft surface would providing meaningful insights into the system or subject under observation. For instance, in a long-term care setting where patients need to be monitored for pressure ulcers, a bedding material that could sense the pressure points between a person’s body and the mattress could alert care givers that an adjustment in body position is warranted. Likewise, in a sports training application, a pressure sensitive boxing ring canvas could track a boxer’s footwork, or punching power and hand speed if applied to the inside of a punching bag.   Pressure sensitive soft toys could also benefit from feedback that might differ when a child scratches behind their stuffed animal’s ears vs. rubbing its belly.  To achieve discrete sensing in these applications, a low cost bulk sensing system is needed.

Stretchable electronics are a new, emerging class of electronic devices that can conform to complex non-planar and deformable surfaces such as human organs, textiles, and robotics. Functional fillers incorporated with elastic polymers form composites for use in intrinsically stretchable electronics. These composites can be amenable to high-throughput, low-cost, additive printing technologies that include screen, inkjet, flexography, and 3D printing. However, the properties of the functional and elastic materials used to date have been mutually antagonistic, thus limiting achievement of state-of-the-art functional properties and high elasticity. The present invention relates to the development of random composite inks using triblock copolymer for stretchable electronics. The key novelty offered here is the ability to tolerate higher loadings of inelastic, functional materials without sacrificing the elastic properties of the ink.

Materials with defined pores and high surface are utilized in a number of industrial applications such as gas sorption, catalysis and drug delivery.  Because of their extraordinary surface area, developing these types of materials with MOFs is desirable but has proved challenging to manufacture consistently.   A need still exists for a method to make such materials with high porosity and hydrophobicity that is straightforward and reproducible.

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As of 2012, the pharmaceutical market share of peptide/protein therapeutics was >$40 billion annually. However, due to their instability in vivo, most peptide therapeutics must be directly injected at the site of action. This has a negative impact on patient compliance and, as such, many peptide therapies are only used clinically as salvage treatments.Several existing approaches for producing peptides protected from proteolysis involve chemical modification of the amino acid sequence. This generally necessitates multiple rounds of structure-function studies to verify that the activity of the peptide is not altered. Other approaches not using chemical modification of the amino acid sequence may involve conjugation of the peptide to a pre-formed higher molecular weight structure, such as a polymer or nanomaterial. The downside of these approaches is that they require multiple conjugation and purification steps and the generation of the high molecular weight carrier. Inefficiencies in cellular uptake and rapid digestion by proteases are two key problems that have limited the clinical efficacy of peptide-based therapeutics.

Strategies for the polymerization of (graft-through) and polymerization from (graft-from) proteins and peptides have been used to build macromolecules through sequential addition of monomers to a growing chain, taking advantage of polymerization catalyst proficiency and avoiding kinetically unfavorable conjugations (graft-to) between multiple large macromolecules. However, unlike for other bio-molecules (saccharides, peptides, and proteins), there are no examples of graft-through polymerization and few examples of graft-from polymerization of nucleic acids. Therefore, despite their promise, polymer bioconjugates of true nucleic acid sequences have been mostly limited to those prepared via post-polymerization modification and hence are difficult to reproduce and suffer from incomplete incorporation of the nucleic acid at each position of the polymer.

Tissue engineering has recently focused on biomimetic matrices, usually polymer hydrogels, that include multiple layers with distinct structures and chemical components. Current methods of fabricating such matrices are complex or expensive to implement and often produce mechanical weaknesses between layers. Thus, an adaptable, facile, and economical multilayer polymer fabrication technique that produces continuous interfaces between layers is needed.