From Dendrimers to Macrocycles: 80 Years George R. Newkome—Milestones of a Gentleman Scientist

Abstract

Prof. George R. Newkome will become 80 years old in November 2018 and his extraordinary research results of the last 50 years are highlighted in this essay. He was one of the pioneers of dendrimers and invented the new field of metallodendrimers, which feature the high benefit of a selective synthesis. This building principle was later utilized for the preparation of 2D and 3D molecules. For this purpose, simple molecular units were assembled to complex architectures by simple complexation of terpyridines with metals.

In vivo therapeutic applications of phosphorus dendrimers: state of the art

“…Huge numbers of therapeutic areas have been well considered with phosphorus dendrimers, both as drugs and nanocarriers [e.g., small interfering RNAs (siRNAs)]. The majority of the PAMAM dendrimers have been used as nanocarriers, mainly in oncology (as depicted by several studies from Tomalia [26], Backer [27] and Newkome [28]), using Fréchet's polyester dendrimer-[poly(ethylene oxide)] ('bow-tie' dendrimer) [29] and Simanek's triazine dendrimers [30]. In addition, theranostic applications in cancer have been developed by Shi, who used non-invasive functionalized PAMAM-entrapped gold(0) NPs [31], and Tomalia [32].…”

Peptide Multimerization as Leads for Therapeutic Development

“…Further innovations not only facilitate these classical dendrimer structures but develop a subtype, named as metallodendrimers, which combined dendritic polymer structures with metallic complexes. A recent summary of the extensive work of Newkome highlighted the applications and potentials of metallodendrimers [78]. Poly-lysine-based dendrimer structures are built in a different manner by taking advantage of the bifurcate structure of lysine and utilize N α and N ε amino groups as reactive functionalities [79], where Boc-Lys-Boc and/or Fmoc-Lys(Fmoc) are used to create a branching structure and elongate the sequence via step-wise peptide synthesis or by chemical conjugation of peptide sequences [38].…”

Formation of a Hollow Core in Dendrimers in Solvents

“…Since the last decade of 20th century dendrimers have become a subject of intense research, which was overviewed in more than 600 reviews (see, for example [ 4–33 ] ) and several books and monographs, [ 34–41 ] including the most recent. [ 42–48 ]…”