Preparation of doxorubicin, gold and magnetic NPs loaded on Albumin NPs as well as in vitro treatment of MCF-7 breast cancer cells

Among different diseases, cancer is the main cause of death all over the world. It is treated by chemotherapy, radiaotherapy, surgery or a combination of these protocols. However, the main hurdles in treatment of cancer are the nonspecific absorption of chemotherapeutic drugs by healthy cells as well as drug resistance at tumor sites. Nowadays, through design of drug delivery systems, scientists overcome these limitations by increasing the drug solubility, specificity, maximum tolerance dosage and decreasing drug toxicity. Doxorubicin is one of the famous and common agent for treating various types of cancers such as soft-tissue sarcoma and has so many adverse side effects such as cardiotoxicity, myelosuppression, typhlitis, nausea, vomiting, and alopecia [1]. So there is a serious need to design a biocampatible and controllable nanocarrier with minimum adverse effects for doxorubicin delivery to the cancer cells.The aim of this work is to study the preparation and characterization of a new, biodegradable and controllable doxorubicin, gold and magnetic nanoparticles loaded on albumin nanoparticles (Dox/GNPs/MNPs-BSA-NPs) as well as considering its capability for in vitro treatment of MCF-7 human breast cancer cells. Monodisperse citrate-stabilized Au NPs and Fe3O4 NPs were synthesized using Bastus et al. [2] and modified coprecipitation method [3], respectively, while doxorubicin, AuNPs and MNPs loaded albumin nanoparticles (Dox/GNPs/MNPs-BSA-NPs) were prepared by desolvation-crosslinking method. Drug loading capacity of the designed system was determined by uv-visible spectrophotometer and found to be about 59.37 mg Dox/g albumin. Furthermore, about %65.6 of the encapsulated drug release during 192 hours through a mild diffusion. The anti-tumor effect on MCF-7 human cancer cells treated in vitro with Dox/GNPs/MNPs-BSA-NPs was evaluated by MTT assay. The experimental results revealed that Dox/GNPs/MNPs-BSA-NPs significantly inhibit the proliferation of MCF-7 cells while the coating of albumin helps reduction the toxicity of GNPs and MNPs. The prepared nanoparticles composed of mixed doxorubicin, MNPs and GNPs is a promising design for control and targeted delivery of anticancer drugs to the MCF-7 cells.