Abstract
Graphene Oxide (GO) has recently attracted substantial attention in biomedical field as an effective platform for biological sensing, tissue scaffolds and in vitro fluorescence imaging. However, the targeting modality and the capability of its in vivo detection have not been explored. To enhance the functionality of GO, we combine it with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (Fe3O4 NPs) serving as a biocompatible magnetic drug delivery addends and magnetic resonance contrast agent for MRI. Synthesized GO-Fe3O4 conjugates have an average size of 260 nm and show low cytotoxicity comparable to that of GO. Fe3O4 nanoparticles provide superparamagnetic properties for magnetic targeted drug delivery allowing simple manipulation by the magnetic field and magnetic resonance imaging with high r2/r1 relaxivity ratios of ~10.7. GO-Fe3O4 retains pH-sensing capabilities of GO used in this work to detect cancer versus healthy environments in vitro and exhibits fluorescence in the visible for bioimaging. As a drug delivery platform GO-Fe3O4 shows successful fluorescence-tracked transport of hydrophobic doxorubicin non-covalently conjugated to GO with substantial loading and 2.5-fold improved efficacy. As a result, we propose GO-Fe3O4 nanoparticles as a novel multifunctional magnetic targeted platform for high efficacy drug delivery traced in vitro by GO fluorescence and in vivo via MRI capable of optical cancer detection.
Highlights
Graphene is a gapless semiconductor that is actively used in microelectronics and materials science.[1, 2] Due to complexity of scalable fabrication, its functional derivatives provide higher benefit for some of the applications
To fully predict the capability of intracellular transport the charge and hydrophobicity of graphene oxide (GO) need to be taken in account, the smaller ~250 nm nanoparticle sizes are expected to be more suitable for cellular internalization.[53,54,55]
APTES is more stable than oleic acid due to a covalent bond between APTES and Fe3O4, whereas oleic acid is bonded by a noncovalent interaction The TEM of the final product, GO-Fe3O4 conjugates shows a randomly distributed Fe3O4 NPs across GO flakes (Fig 2C) while the Ferrozine assay complementary confirms the presence of iron
Summary
Graphene is a gapless semiconductor that is actively used in microelectronics and materials science.[1, 2] Due to complexity of scalable fabrication, its functional derivatives provide higher benefit for some of the applications. Graphene oxide/iron oxide for drug delivery, magnetic resonance/fluorescence imaging and cancer sensing
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