Development of Spontaneously Disassembling Dendrimers as a Platform Technology for PARACEST MRI Contrast Agents

Yuguo Li¹, Mark D. Pagel¹

Spontaneously disassembling dendrimers are nanocarriers can carry high payloads of chemotherapies to pathological tissues, and then rapidly release the chemotherapies during enzyme-triggered spontaneous disassembly of the dendrimers. To investigate whether a spontaneously disassembling systems can generate a PARACEST effect, a non-dendritic model system was shown to generate a PARACEST effect after enzyme-triggered spontaneous disassembly. To investigate the translation of this approach to a dendritic system, the G0 core of a spontaneously disassembling dendrimer was designed and synthesized. This platform technology is being refined for PARACEST MRI.