Water‐Soluble Well‐Defined Bifunctional Ferrocenyl Dendrimer with Anti‐Cancer Activity

Combination of advantages of ferrocenyl compounds and multifunctional dendrimer scaffold afforded a water-soluble well-defined bifunctional dendrimer with polyamide backbone and thirty two termini: eighteen carboxylic acid groups and eighteen triazolylferrocenyl moieties. The structure of the new dendrimer was thoroughly characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, absorbance spectroscopy in the UV-vis, and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. The MALDI-TOF spectrum of the final dendrimer showed the [M](2+) ion peak at 4820.1 m/z unambiguously confirming the successful synthesis of the water-soluble well-defined bifunctional dendrimer. The cytotoxicity of the well-defined bifunctional triazolylferrocenyl dendrimer 4 was evaluated against MCF-7 (breast adenocarcinoma), HeLa (cervical cancer), PC3 (prostate adenocarcinoma), Caco-2 (colorectal cancer), and PNT2 (normal prostate cells) cell lines. The cytotoxicity assays showed that the dendrimer exhibits moderate anticancer activity and targets cancer cells selectively over normal cells.