Carbon Nano-Onions for Theragnostic Applications
Abstract
It’s widely known that modern chemotherapy treatments cause severe side effects in patients due to the inability of many cancer drugs to target cancer cells over normal, healthy tissues. Targeted nanocarrier systems are one way of solving this problem, in this work boron/nitrogen co-doped carbon nano-onions (BN-CNOs) are used as a scaffold for these systems. BN-CNOs are small, multi-layered, spherical carbon nanoparticles which contain B and N atoms. Their biocompatibility and small size give them promising potential for use in drug delivery and biological imaging systems. The focus of this project is to create an anticancer nanocarrier system by non-covalently functionalising BN-CNOs with a hyaluronic acid based conjugate polymer (HA-DMPE) to increase their aqueous dispersibility and targetability towards cancer cells overexpressing the CD44 receptor. The loading and pH-triggered release of anticancer drugs Doxorubicin (DOX) and Abemaciclib (Abema) were then studied. The systems were characterised via microscopic and spectroscopic analysis and the cytotoxicity and cellular uptake of the DOX nanocarrier system was tested on triple-negative breast cancer cells. The nanocarrier formulation displayed significant improvements in uptake and anticancer efficacy compared to DOX alone and Caelyx® (an approved liposomal formulation of DOX) as well as reduced side effects when tested in human heart cells. The development of novel doped CNOs is also presented in this work, namely N, P, S, and BPN CNOs. These nanoparticles were investigated as catalysts for the evolution of hydrogen from sodium borohydride under ambient conditions.
