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Abstract
Paclitaxel (Taxol®) is an important anticancer drug in clinical use for treatment of a variety of cancers. Because of its low solubility, it is formulated in high concentration in Cremophor EL® which induces hypersensitivity reactions. In this study, targeted delivery of paclitaxel-loaded nanoparticles was prepared by a desolvation procedure, crosslinked on the wall material of bovine serum albumin, and subsequently decorated by folic acid. The characteristics of the nanoparticles, such as amount of folate conjugation, surface morphology, drug entrapment efficiency, drug loading efficiency, and release kinetics were investigated in vitro. The targeting effect was investigated in vitro by cancer cell uptake of fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled nanoparticles. The spherical nanoparticles obtained were negatively charged with a zeta potential of about −30 mV, and characterized around 210 nm with a narrow size distribution. Drug entrapment efficiency and drug loading efficiency were approximately 95.3% and 27.2%, respectively. The amount of folate conjugation was 9.22 μg/mg of bovine serum albumin. The folate-decorated nanoparticles targeted a human prostate cancer cell line effectively.
Supplementary figure
Figure S1 Chromatograph profile of paclitaxel by high performance liquid chromatography.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Key Technology R and D Program (2006BAD18B0401) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (41409202). The authors express their gratitude to Yongzhi Cui for conducting the SEM analysis.
Disclosure
The authors report no conflict of interest in this work.