Role of dendrimers in advanced drug delivery and biomedical applications: a review.

AIM: Dendrimers dendritic structural design holds vast promises, predominantly for drug delivery, owing to their unique properties. Dendritic architecture is widespread topology found in nature and offers development of specific properties of chemical substances. Dendrimers are an ideal delivery vehicle candidate for open study of the effects of polymer size, charge, and composition on biologically relevant properties such as lipid bilayer interactions, cytotoxicity, bio-distribution, internalization, blood plasma retention time, and filtration. This article reviews role of dendrimers in advanced drug delivery and biomedical applications.

Radiation-modified structure of Ge25Sb15S60 and Ge35Sb5S60 glasses.

Atomic structures of Ge(25)Sb(15)S(60) and Ge(35)Sb(5)S(60) glasses are investigated in the gamma-irradiated and annealed after gamma-irradiation states by means of high-energy synchrotron x-ray diffraction technique. The first sharp diffraction peak (FSDP) is detected at around 1.1 A(-1) in the structure factors of both alloys studied. The FSDP position is found to be stable for radiation/annealing treatment of the samples, while the FSDP intensity shows some changes between gamma-irradiated and annealed states. The peaks in the pair distribution functions observed between 2 and 4 A are related to the Ge-S, Ge-Sb, and Sb-Sb first neighbor correlations and Ge-Ge second neighbor correlations in the edge-shared GeS(42) tetrahedra, and S-S and/or Ge-Ge second neighbor correlations in the corner-shared GeS(42) tetrahedra. Three mechanisms of the radiation-/annealing-induced changes are discussed in the framework of coordination topological defect formation and bond-free solid angle concepts.