Multifunctional Dendrimers for Drug Nanocarriers

Abstract

Dendrimers are nanosized, monodisperse, highly branched polymers with well-defined topological structure which have attracted much attention for drug delivery recently. To further improve the performance of dendrimers in drug delivery, various functional dendrimers are developed by decorating the dendrimers with targeting agents, imaging agents, or stimuli-sensitive moieties. They show good biocompatibility, visibility, tumor targeting and stimuli-sensitive properties for drug or gene delivery. This chapter will focus on the design of multifunctional nanocarriers based on the dendrimers. Therefore, the chapter will provide the ideas for designing the dendrimers based nanocarriers for controllable drug delivery and let more people know the development of dendrimers for drug delivery in recent years.