Characterization of cisplatin loaded hydrophilic glycol chitosan modified eumelanin nanoparticles for potential controlled-release application

Abstract

Free liquid cytotoxic substances, such as cisplatin (CDDP), have been widely administered for the conventional chemotherapy treatment of cancer patients. However, this classical approach has several drawbacks, including high dosage requirements, poor bioavailability, low therapeutic index, and geno-/cyto-toxicity resulting in several adverse side effects that constrain patient compliance and clinical outcomes. Such downsides can be improved by replacing conventional drugs with advanced nanocomposite-drug conjugates. In line with this, our study aimed to characterize a novel potential drug nano delivery system, so-called hydrophilic glycol chitosan (HGC) coated melanin nanoparticles (MNPs), to improve the abovementioned constraints in the case of classical chemotherapy drug cisplatin. Following the production of MNP-based nanocomplexes by a single-step mixing, essential physical and chemical characterizations were performed. The nanoformulations generated here were spherically shaped with an optimum size range (between 100 and 200 nm) and exhibited comparable drug loading capacities (21.7% +/- 0.5 for the CDDP-MNPs and 24.7% +/- 0.4 for HGC/CDDP-MNPs) and remarkable entrapment efficiencies (93.2% +/- 2.0 for CDDP-MNPs and 94.9% +/- 1.1 for HGC/CDDP-MNPs) as a biopolymer. Notably, the cell viability assay showed that MNP-based nanocarriers could inhibit the proliferation of liver cancer cells in a more prolonged fashion compared to free CDDP. The TGA and FTIR-ATR analyses confirmed the compatibility between CDDP and its nanocarrier MNP. The Super Case II Transport was primarily in charge of controlling CDDP release from both matrices as a result of polymer relaxation and swelling of HGC-CDDP-MNPs and CDDP-MNPs, which is highly preferred because it enables simple manipulation of the nanocarrier properties to suit the disease biology. All of these findings point to the natural MNP-based nanoformulation's superiority as a prospective and cutting-edge chemotherapeutic nano-delivery technology.