Session Speaker

Hydrophobically Modified Carboxymethyl Chitosan Nanoparticles for Targeted Delivery of Anti-cancer Drugs
P. Pramanik

Chitosan, a polymer derived from chitin, has been used for drug delivery because of its biocompatibility, biodegradability and bio-adhesiveness. Nanoparticles of chitosan can be modified easily to get various degree of hydrophobicity by simple soft chemistry. Encapsulating a hydrophobic core of the particle in their nanoreservoir structure have been developed as a target-specific carrier for a water-insoluble drug, paclitaxel. Various anti-cancer organic drug like Paclitaxel, Doxorubicin, Curcumin etc and inorganic anti-cancer compounds like Zirconium salt,Gadolinum salts ,Platinum compounds can be used to treat patients with lung, ovarian, breast cancer, head and neck cancer, and also used for the prevention of restenosis through the nano-vehicle made of derivatives of chitosan . This work has thus initiated to synthesize o-carboxy methyl chitosan modified with various organic acids and tagging with folic acid which have been synthesized by simple carbodimide reaction and characterized by 1H NMR. Uses of various organic acids have tailored the hydrophobicity of the vehicle so that it can accommodate various drugs or compound having different hydrophobicity or hydrophillicity Nanoparticles of organic acid-carboxy methyl chitosan-folic acid have been prepared by the sonication method after chemical modification without surfactants/emulsifiers involved. The nanoparticles have been characterized by various state-of-the-art techniques, including laser light scattering for particles size and size distribution, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) for surface morphology. To study in vitro drug release kinetics HeLa cells and B16F0 cells have been used to evaluate in vitro cytotoxicity of the paclitaxel-loaded nanoparticles.