Design of lonzymes for prodrug-based cancer therapy

• Autor(a) principal: Russo, André
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/143742
• topic: iron oxide nanoparticles; paracetamol; peroxidase-like activity; chitosan; ionotropic gelation; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Nanotecnologia

Cancer is one of the major public health issues in the world, being one of the principal causes of death around the world. Different cancer treatments have been extensively studied in the past years, being nanomedicine one of the latest approaches with tremendous potential, studied by various research groups for cancer therapy. Different types of nanoparticles can be used for different methods, and have different properties. Some of the different types of na-noparticles being studied for cancer treatment are inorganic nanoparticles, organic nanopar-ticles, polymeric nanoparticles like chitosan nanoparticles and iron oxide nanoparticles. In this work, we have evaluated the peroxidase-like activity of iron oxide nanoparticles to convert paracetamol to its` cytotoxic form, in order to kill cancer cells. And in order to use the peroxidase-like activity of iron oxide nanoparticles with paracetamol, we incorporated the prodrug and the iron oxide nanoparticles by coating them with chitosan using the ionotropic gelation technique. After we optimized the encapsulation process and achieved homogeneous suspensions of nanoparticles coated with chitosan and with 55% of encapsulation efficiency of the drug, the obtained nanoparticles were characterized in terms of their constitution and cytotoxicity. The characterization results confirmed the presence of paracetamol in the ob-tained nanoparticles, and that the incorporation of paracetamol didn`t significantly change the physical and chemical properties of iron oxide nanoparticles coated with chitosan. The cytotoxicity results showed no significant cytotoxicity of nanoparticles with paracetamol when compared with nanoparticles without paracetamol, leading us to conclude that parace-tamol was either not converted to its cytotoxic form by peroxidase-like activity, or was not converted to the extent required for a cytotoxic effect.