During the last three decades, dendrimers, nano-sized highly-branched fractal-like symmetrical macromolecules, have been intensively studied as promising candidates for application as drug-delivery carriers. Among other important characteristics arising from their unique and highly-controlled architecture, size and surface properties, the possibility of hosting guest molecules in internal voids represents a key advantage underlying the potential of dendrimers as non-covalent drug-encapsulating agents. The impressive amount of accumulating experimental results to date allows researchers to identify the most important and promising theoretical and practical aspects of the use of dendrimers for this purpose. This review covers the main factors, phenomena, and mechanisms involved in this drug-vectorization approach, including mechanisms of non-covalent dendrimer-drug association, dendrimer-dendrimer interactions, as well as biological properties relevant to the host dendrimers. A discussion is then provided to illustrate some successful existing formulation strategies as well as to propose some new possible ones to optimize further development of the field.

在过去的三十年中，树枝状大分子，纳米级高支化的分形样对称大分子已被广泛研究，有望用作药物递送载体。由于其独特且受高度控制的结构，尺寸和表面特性而产生的其他重要特征中，将客体分子保留在内部空隙中的可能性代表了树状聚合物作为非共价药物包封剂潜力的关键优势。迄今为止积累的令人印象深刻的大量实验结果使研究人员能够确定为此目的使用树枝状聚合物的最重要和最有希望的理论和实践方面。这篇综述涵盖了这种药物媒介化方法所涉及的主要因素，现象和机制，包括非共价树状体-药物缔合的机制，树状体-树状体相互作用以及与宿主树状体相关的生物学特性。然后提供讨论以说明一些成功的现有配方策略，并提出一些新的可能策略以优化该领域的进一步发展。