Novel lysosome targeted molecular transporter built on a guanidinium-poly-(propylene imine) hybrid dendron for efficient delivery of doxorubicin into cancer cells.

An efficient synthetic approach has been adopted to construct a new dendron-based octa-guanidine appended molecular transporter with a lysosomal targeted peptide–doxorubicin conjugate. The transporter alone (G8-PPI-FL) is found to be non-toxic, showed higher cellular uptake compared to Arg-8-mer and exhibited excellent selectivity towards lysosomes in cathepsin B expressing HeLa cells, while the Dox-conjugate showed significant cytotoxicity to cancer cells without affecting the non-cancerous cells.