Novel aldehyde-terminated dendrimers; synthesis and cytotoxicity assay.

INTRODUCTION Polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers are a unique family of dendritic polymers with numerous pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. One major problem with these polymers is their cytotoxicity. The purpose of this study was to synthesize novel dendrimers with aldehyde terminal groups and compare their cytotoxicity with that of dendri¬mers containing amine-terminated groups. METHODS G1(first generation) and G2 (second generation) dendrimers with amine-terminated groups were synthesized by divergent method and then the amine-terminated groups were converted to the aldehyde groups using surface modification of the functional group inversion (FGI) method. The cytotoxicity of the novel G1 and G2 polyamidoaldehyde (PAMAL) dendrimers together with that of G1 and G2 PAMAM-NH2 dendrimers was investigated by MTT assay using MCF-7 cell line. RESULTS The results showed that cytotoxicity of dendrimers with aldehyde-terminated groups is much lower than that of G1 and G2 PAMAM-NH2 dendri¬mers. CONCLUSION Dendrimers with aldehyde-terminated groups could be used as novel and convenient carriers for drug delivery with low cytotoxic effect compared with the amine-terminated dendrimers. The results revealed that the same generations of the dendri¬mers with aldehyde-terminated groups are far less toxic than the corresponding amine-terminated dendrimers.