Aliasghar Hamidi
1,2,3, Simin Sharifi
1,3, Soodabeh Davara
1,2, Saeed Ghasemi
2,3, Yadollah Omidi
1,4 
, Mohammad-Reza Rashidi
1,2*1 Research Center for Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Faculty of Pharmacy, T abriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
2 Department of Medicinal Chemistry , Faculty of Pharmacy, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
3 Students’ Research Committee, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
4 Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Abstract
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 is to synthesize novel dendrimers with aldehyde
terminal groups and compare their cytotoxicity with that of dendrimers
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 dendrimers.
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 denderimers. The results revealed that the same generations of the dendrimers with aldehyde-terminated groups are far less toxic than the corresponding amine-terminated denderimer.