Dendrimers in Nanomedicine: History, Concept and Properties of Dendrimers

Dendrimers are chemically produced polymeric nanostructures. They are constructed around a single core unit, and several branches emerged from it in a layer by layer manner. Dendrons are the smallest unit of dendrimers and can be divided into three parts: empty core unit, the interior branching units and the periphery end part. The empty space inside the dendrons is utilised for the encapsulation of drug molecules for different purposes like solubilisation, targeting, controlled release or protection from the surrounding degrading environment. So dendrimers are considered as an architectural pattern and not a single compound. In comparison to traditional methods for drug delivery, dendrimers have different advantages such as bulk drug loading capacity, interior section for encapsulation, portion wise distribution of the drug, etc. All dendron units together provide flexibility in size, which leads to accurate physicochemical properties (hydrophilic and lipophilic) of drugs. Stability, pharmacokinetics and biodistribution of the drug can then be clearly seen. In addition, dendrimers also serve as potential scaffolds, which contain a number of ligands and thereby increase their concentration and increase the chances of rebinding. Also, dendrimers can line up these ligands and persuade multivalency after cluster formation on the receptors. The present chapter provides a glimpse of historical aspects and different physicochemical properties of dendrimers.