Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1927924 Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 2015 7 Pages PDF
Abstract

•Dendrimer drugs show remarkable therapeutic efficacy in animal models of disease.•Their polyvalency enables access to important new biological targets in major diseases.•Smaller dendrimer drugs will make for the best medicines in infection & inflammation.•Analytical chemistry needs to improve to enable IND certification & clinical trials.•Public-private partnerships are now needed to progress them as medicines to market.

Biologists are dissecting complex biological pathways at breath taking speed. It is opening up new opportunities for the therapeutic evaluation of novel dendrimer drugs. This review focuses on studies of small dendrimers decorated with sulfate, phosphonate, N-acetyl-cysteine, glucosamine and mannose in animal model studies of infection and inflammation. It highlights those animal model studies which have demonstrated the most promising dendrimer drug constructs as potential new medicines. The issues relating to their analytical chemistry that are slowing the progress of dendrimer drugs into the clinic are highlighted. It should be possible to solve these with additional analytical expertise because it is small dendrimers with only 16–32 peripheral groups that make for the best infection and inflammation related medicines. Public-private partnerships are now needed to progress these dendrimer drugs into proof-of-concept clinical trials.

Related Topics
Life Sciences Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Biochemistry
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