Dendrimers as Powerful Building Blocks in Central Nervous System Disease: Headed for Successful Nanomedicine

Dendrimers have emerged as a powerful class of nanomaterials in the nanomedicine field due to their unique structural features: globular, well-defined, highly branched and controllable structure, nanosize-scale, low polydispersity, and the presence of several terminal groups that can be functionalized with different ligands simulating the multivalency present in different biological systems. Although in its infancy, the application of dendrimers as therapeutics or theranostic tools in central nervous system (CNS) disorders is already significant and has opened promising avenues in the treatment of many conditions where the inherent "smartness" of the dendritic structures is being explored to effectively target the CNS. Here we present an overview of the past and future challenges of the use of dendrimers to respond to one of the ultimate challenges in the (nano)medicine field: to attain CNS repair and regeneration. ; V Leiro, SD Santos, and CDF Lopes contributed equally to this work. The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Fundo para a Investigação em Saúde (INFARMED, project reference FIS-2015-01_CCV_20150630-88), as well as the FEDER funds through the Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização – COMPETE 2020 and the Portuguese funds through FCT − Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia in the frame of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016639 (reference PTDC/CTM-NAN/3547/2014). SD Santos is supported by FCT funds (SFRH/BPD/109297/2015). V Leiro is supported by the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000012, financed by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).