• Design of two water soluble dendrimers with peripheral β-cyclodextrin units. • These dendrimers include an EDTA core, Fréchet-type dendrons with β-CD units. • Divergent methodology afforded the desired products in yields above 80%. • Click chemistry with a classical CuAAC reaction was employed as building strategy. • These dendrimers showed an aqueous solubility higher than 0.96 g mL −1 . Two Fréchet type dendritic platforms were obtained by selective functionalization of readily accessible ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) core with four and eight peripheral β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) units through Cu(I)-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC). These molecules, a bis-substituted dendritic compound and first-generation dendrimer, were envisaged as potential nanocarriers for drug loading and controlled release. The synthetic approach focused on two aspects: a) the incorporation of Fréchet-type dendrons to access terminal alkyne units for CuAAC reaction, and b) a divergent synthetic approach for the growth of the dendrimeric platforms from the core to the periphery. Structural characterization of all intermediates and final dendritic platforms was carried out by one- and two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy, FTIR, and mass spectrometry (DART and MALDI-TOF). The aqueous solubility of the dendrimers ( EDTA-βCD 4 and EDTA-βCD 8 ) attained 0.96 g mL −1 , approximately 52 times higher than the solubility of the native β-CD.
Valdés-Negrín et al. (Fri,) studied this question.