The intriguing journey of gH625-dendrimer

The advent of nanotechnology brought the promise to revolutionize disease treatment. In recent years, nanotechnology has been successfully utilized to create novel drug delivery systems, which allow the reduction of unwanted side effects of systemic delivery, while increasing drug accumulation in specific cells of the body and improving the therapeutic efficacy. The knowledge of the mechanism used by vectors to gain access into the cell interior is key to the development of novel and effective drug delivery tools to apply for many different pathologies. Dendrimers have been used as powerful platforms for drug delivery. They are perfectly hyperbranched macromolecules with a well-defined structure, which exhibit properties very different from linear polymers with the same composition and molecular weight. The attachment of the peptide sequences to the termini of a dendrimer allows the conjugate to penetrate into the cellular matrix, whereas the unfunctionalized dendrimer is excluded from translocation. The peptide functionalized dendrimer is rapidly taken into the cells mainly through a non-active translocation mechanism[1-2]. The role of the initial interaction with the membrane bilayer is widely accepted, although it is still unclear. We used neutron reflectivity experiments and internalization studies with cells to reveal the extension of interaction of dendrimers functionalized with the peptide gH625 with biomimetic membranes. gH625 represents a good choice for the design of promising carriers to deliver drugs for the treatment of human diseases, while the goal of the internalization studies was to investigate the use of Caco2 cells as a possible tool for assessing the membrane permeability properties of the peptido-dendrimer. The study has demonstrated that dendrimer functionalized with gH625 is promising for the drug delivery.