What promise for dendrimers?

PAMAMOS: The first commercial silicon‐containing dendrimers and their applications

“…For example, within the PAMAMOS-TMS series (top left in Fig. 2), this change was from high solubility of nonsubstituted amine-terminated PAMAMs in water and methanol and insolubility in most organic solvents, 4,19 to solubility of about 60% TMS-substituted derivative in water, methanol, and polar organics (such as chloroform and THF), to solubility of completely TMS-substituted PAMAMOS in methanol, polar organics, and toluene, and insolubility in water. 19 Computer modeling studies performed by Dr. Steven Keinath of MMI revealed that this behavior was directly related to the degree of interaction between the hydrophilic PAMAM interior and the surrounding environment, and only when this interaction was seriously restricted did the oleophilic nature of the OS exteriors begin to dominate PAMAMOS solubility.…”

“…And PAMAMs were available in 11 generations. 4 On the silicon dendrimer front, the situation was also rapidly developing. Aziz Muzafarov and his coworkers at the Institute for Synthetic Polymer Materials of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow had already published (in 1989) their classic paper on the synthesis of the first polysiloxane dendrimers, 6 and Massamune and Kakimoto followed suite with two other approaches toward similar compositions in 1991.…”

“…41 In fact, this can happen even when it is not desired, if for example specific precautions are not taken during the synthesis. 4 When they crosslink, however, dendrimers tend to form high density networks that cannot readily be processed into useful shapes or objects. Consequently, dendrimer networks have received relatively little attention when compared with their molecular precursors.…”

“…Most notable among these were the dendrimerbased catalysts of Gerard van Koten and his colleagues at University of Utrecht, Holland, 12 which were aimed at revolutionizing the field of catalytic chemistry by marrying the benefits of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis. 13 The other two main groups of siliconbased dendrimers were reported later: polysilanes independently by Lambert's, 14 Sekiguchi's, 15 and Suzuki's 16 groups, and polysilazenes by Hu and Son, 17 in 1995 and 1998, respectively.…”

“…At that time, MMI hosted one of the largest groups of scientists in the world working on dendrimers. In 1992, they founded Dendritech, Inc., the first company for commercial production of dendrimers (based on polyamidoamine (PAMAM) chemistry 4 ), and because of their availability either through Aldrich or directly from Dendritech, PAMAMs soon became the best characterized and most utilized of all dendrimer families. Indeed, for the explosion of interest in dendritic polymers that started in the early 1990s, 5 the new molecular architecture was much more important than composition.…”