Cyclophane-Based Dendrimers: Today and Tomorrow

For decades, dendrimers have attracted the great interest of researchers, and continue to do so to this day. These compounds found a wide variety of applications in such areas as medicine, catalysis, and electronics. However, their synthesis is very expensive, and purification and isolation are difficult. In addition, dendrimers are often highly toxic. Toxic properties are significantly dependent on the generation and terminal group features. For the toxicity, decreasing the modification of dendrimer structure is widely used. This review discusses some examples of constructing dendrimers based on macrocyclic compounds—cyclophanes (pillararenes, resorcinarenes, and (thia)calixarenes). Preparation of these hybrids is not very difficult, and due to the presence of a hydrophobic macrocyclic platform, they acquire a number of practically useful properties that are not available to traditional dendrimers, such as additional opportunities for encapsulating substrates. Moreover, dendrimers acquire amphiphilic and chiral properties. This review is devoted to the features of the synthesis and properties of macrocyclic dendrimers based on cyclophanes. The review also demonstrates the prospects of using the resulting dendrimers for medicine, sensorics, catalysis and alternative energy sources.