Organic Chemistry Seminar – Toyin Ayandokun
About the event
Speaker: Toyin Ayandokun
Group: Dr. Anjali Sharma
Title: Multifunctional Dendrimers for Controlled Drug Delivery: Overcoming Limitations of Conventional Monofunctional Nanocarriers
Abstract
The development of efficient drug delivery systems remains a major challenge in modern therapeutics, particularly for the treatment of complex diseases such as cancer and inflammatory disorders. Many promising therapeutic agents fail in clinical trials due to poor solubility, limited bioavailability, and off-target toxicity. Nanocarriers have emerged as powerful platforms for addressing these challenges by enhancing drug stability, solubility, targeting efficiency, and therapeutic efficacy. Among these systems, dendrimers have attracted considerable attention due to their highly branched, monodisperse architecture and multiple surface functional groups that enable tunable chemical modification.
Conventional dendrimer drug delivery systems typically involve attaching therapeutic molecules to dendrimer surfaces via reactions such as amide coupling or click chemistry. While these approaches enable multivalent drug loading, they often lead to heterogeneous products with variable numbers of drug molecules attached to the dendrimer surface. As a result, batch-to-batch inconsistency and poorly defined stoichiometry can significantly affect reproducibility and biological performance. These limitations have motivated the development of bifunctional and multifunctional dendrimers, in which controlled numbers of therapeutic or functional groups are incorporated into the dendrimer architecture through rational synthetic design.
Recent advances demonstrate that multifunctional dendrimers can enable precise control over drug loading, improved reproducibility, and the simultaneous delivery of multiple therapeutic agents. This seminar will discuss the structural features of dendrimers that make them attractive nanocarriers for drug delivery and examine the limitations associated with conventional monofunctional dendrimer systems. Recent research examples that demonstrated the design, synthesis, and biological evaluation of multifunctional dendrimers will be highlighted, including systems capable of multivalent drug delivery and dual therapeutic functionality. These examples demonstrate how precise molecular engineering of dendrimer architectures can lead to improved therapeutic performance and new opportunities for the development of advanced drug delivery platforms.