A new industrial-scale process for making big molecules with a big future

Dendrimers can be produced in custom-designed shapes, sizes, structures and weights suitable for specific uses. Those potential applications range from drug delivery and gene transfer to new materials, coatings, sensors, and herbicides. But because they require multiple steps to make, dendrimers are difficult to produce on an industrial scale.

In their new study, Abdellatif Chouai and Eric E. Simanek describe a practical large-scale synthesis of dendrimers that sidestep this barrier. Their method yields a so-called “uncommitted intermediate,” a dendrimer scaffolding that can be built upon in countless ways.

This intermediate “can be elaborated into a wealth of diagnostic and therapeutic dendrimers — some of which are currently being explored in our laboratory,” the researchers add.

Source: ACS