Anticancer Effects of Date Seed Oil- Loaded Niosomes and Gemcitabine Combination in MCF-7 Human Breast Cancer Cells

Abstract

Gemcitabine (GEM) is one of the most widely used chemotherapeutic medications for treating various solid tumuors. Niosomes are a novel drug delivery system, self-assembled vesicular nanocarriers and composed of several surfactants and various lipids. Date seed Oil (DSO) contain a high percentage of phenolic and flavonoid compounds that making them important for food and pharmaceutical formulations. In this study, we prepared GEM loaded into anionic niosomes (GEM-niosomes) to target breast tumor cells. The niosomes were prepared with cholesterol (CHOL), span 60, date seed oil and chloroform using the thin film hydration method. GEM-niosomes were fully characterized for their physiochemical properties and evaluated for their cytotoxicity. The targeted niosomes were 100±10nm, the loaded niosomes were in the range of 125±15. GEM-fully loaded DSO-niosomes with drug entrapment percentage (EE%) 82% using high- performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) were developed. The prepared targeted GEM-niosomes showed good stability over 4 weeks at -7ºC and better drug loading. Our targeted GEM-niosomes showed stronger activity against MCF-7 cell by approximately 10 folds compared with the free drug. Taken together, the combination of GEM and “DSO- loaded niosomes” may be of great importance for developing new treatments following in vivo investigations with breast cancer animal models. Future research should explore the in vitro and the in vivo cytotoxicity of this combination on more aggressive breast cancer ( BC).