Recent advances in the study of dendrimers-based drug delivery systems

Dendrimers are hyperbranched, monodisperse and three dimensional macromolecules, which consist of an apolar core and polar shell have been referred to as “unimolecular micelles”. This paper briefly describes the development and structural characteristics of dendrimers and also explains the feature of dendrimers as drug carrier and the dendrimer-drug interactions in details. Recently, dendrimers, which have attracted increasing attention for their applications in many fields such as drug targeted delivery systems and gene transfection, are becoming potential novel carriers.