Metal ion-assisted formation of porous chitosan-based microspheres for biomedical applications

Abstract

As a poly(D-glucosamine), chitosan possesses the ability to chelate bioactive metal ions such as copper and zinc. In this work, metal ion containing microspheres were formed through complexation interactions between glucosamine unit of chitosan and copper and zinc ions, respectively. The successful production of chitosan‒metal ion microspheres was done by high-voltage electrostatic system. The produced microspheres showed a narrow size distribution with average size range of 100–240 µm. The cytotoxicity evaluation of direct cells‒materials contact indicated no toxicity of chitosan–Zn²⁺ microspheres, while chitosan‒Cu²⁺ microspheres containing higher c(Cu²⁺) were cytotoxic for Hek293 cells during 3 days of culture.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Chitosan
• complex
• copper
• cytotoxicity
• microspheres
• zinc

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Croatian Science Foundation [IP-2014-09-3752].