Construction of alginate-arginine polymeric-based nano carriers for paclitaxel in cancer therapy

Nanoparticles of natural or synthetic biopolymers and polysaccharides have been developed and successfully employed for drug delivery applications. They are found to be the most promising and flexible drug delivery systems for transporting therapeutic agents into all parts of the body1. The sodium salts of alginic acid have emergedas one of the most extensively explored biomaterials for pharma-ceutical and biomedical applications2,3. In this study, paclitaxel, a typical chemotherapeutic agent, was selected as the model drug to evaluate of arginine-modified sodium alginate (SA) nanoparticles to load drug. The structure of nanoparticles was elucidated by FTIR. The shape, and morphology were determined by SEM. The mean size, polydispersity index (PDI) and zeta potential (ZP) of the obtained drug loaded nanoparticles were reported to be 342.2 nm, 0.360 and -12.2 mV, respectively.The in-vitro drug release was studied by using UV–Visible spectrophotometer at acidic environment and physiological pH and sustained release compared to the PTX alone. It was found that PTX drug is released much faster in pH 5.0 than in the pH 7.4. In addition, the cytotoxicity of the created nanoparticles was performed by using LDH assay analysis which showed that PTX loaded nanoparticles SA/Alg/PTX were toxic to MCF-7 cell line.

Keywords:

Arginine , sodium alginate , paclitaxel , drug delivery , breast cancer