Structural and physicochemical characteristics of one-step PAMAM dendrimeric nanoparticles

The recently developed One-Step Poly(amidoamine) (OS-PAMAM) dendrimers stand out for their characteristics as the high drug-load capacity and cell-delivery improvement of therapeutic agents. The OS-PAMAM dendrimers have proven to be useful in the biomedical field as nanocarrier or nanosystems for therapy. In the present research it was encouraging to determine their physicochemical characteristics which were compared with commercial PAMAM generation-6 (G6). The spectroscopic measurement of amides, nanoparticle size (10-30 nm), polydispersity index and zeta potential measurements correlates with the commercial product. The OS PAMAM has cavities detected by AFM, and the force analysis showed the same adhesion force and different elasticity than PAMAM-G6. The molecular weight (MW) was 10 times lower than the commercial one for both techniques employed, resembling the MW of a PAMAM generation-3 (G3). OS-PAMAM/PAMAM-G6 MS-MS mirror plots demonstrate chemical equivalency amongst herein analyzed dendrimers, with the advantage that OS-PAMAM is produced with a faster and low-cost synthetic protocol, which allows them to be applied for both research and industry in the biomedical field.