Syntheses of polyamidoamine dendrimers starting from a hexadimensional core and application in gene transfer

Polyamidoamine dendrimers using inositol as a core were designed, synthesized and characterized. The electrostatics interaction of PAMAM dendrimer with DNA causes the condensation of DNA to form DNA/dendrimer complexes. The sizes of complexes prepared from dendrimer G6 and pRE Luc at N/P ratio 10︰1 range from 80 to 300 nm. Dendrimers G3-G6 are able to efficiently deliver pRE Luc and pSV β-gal gene into HeLa and HEK 293 cells. The transfection efficiencies of G5 and G6 are much higher than that of poly L-lysine (PLL) and comparable to that of the commercial branched polyethylenimine (PEI, Mw 25000), whereas the cytoctoxicities of G5 and G6 are lower than that of PLL .