Abstract
The purpose of this study was to use agar as a multifunctional encapsulating material to allow drug and ferromagnetism to be jointly delivered in one nanoparticle. We successfully encapsulated both Fe3O4 and doxorubicin (DOX) with agar as the drug carrier to obtain DOX-Fe3O4@agar. The iron oxide nanoparticles encapsulated in the carrier maintained good saturation of magnetization (41.9 emu/g) and had superparamagnetism. The heating capacity test showed that the specific absorption rate (SAR) value was 18.9 ± 0.5 W/g, indicating that the ferromagnetic nanoparticles encapsulated in the gel still maintained good heating capacity. Moreover, the magnetocaloric temperature could reach 43 °C in a short period of five minutes. In addition, DOX-Fe3O4@agar reached a maximum release rate of 85% ± 3% in 56 min under a neutral pH 7.0 to simulate the intestinal environment. We found using fluorescent microscopy that DOX entered HT-29 human colon cancer cells and reduced cell viability by 66%. When hyperthermia was induced with an auxiliary external magnetic field, cancer cells could be further killed, with a viability of only 15.4%. These results show that agar is an efficient multiple-drug carrier, and allows controlled drug release. Thus, this synergic treatment has potential application value for biopharmaceutical carrier materials.
Highlights
The average particle size of encapsulated iron oxide calculated on Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) images was
X-ray diffraction (XRD) results show that the crystal structures of DOXFe3 O4 @agar at 2θ were 30.3◦, 35.7◦, 43.5◦, 57.4◦, and 62.9◦, which were assigned to magnetite crystal planes (220), (311), (400), (511), and (440)
The results showed that the viability of HT-29 cells cultured with DOX-Fe3 O4 @agar was significantly reduced after hyperthermia
Summary
The design and synthesis of effective drug delivery carrier materials holds critical importance in biomedicine. Studies have shown that conventional chemotherapy may lead to drug resistance during treatment [1,2]. Nanoparticles have been widely used as carrier delivery systems in many studies. In addition to improving drug delivery to tumor cells and prolonging drug efficacy, the use of combined chemotherapy has been widely studied in order to increase the functionality of particle carriers [3]
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