Cancer Therapeutics: Functionalized Magnetic Nanoparticles for Targeted Drug Delivery for the Treatment of Cancer

Breast cancer (BC) has been a terrible disease in which women had suffer due to all the emotional, financial, familiar, and healthy issues it come with. Several subtypes of BC can be treated with different medicinal approaches like hormone therapy. However, the triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtype is the more lethal, deathly, and with the worst survival rate due to the absence of the progesterone and estrogen receptors (PR and ER, respectively) as well as the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). This deficiency of receptors in TNBC patients creates a gap with the medicinal treatments since the existing ones are focused on being applied on those receptors. Therefore, new treatments are needed for assisting TNBC patients. One possible solution is found in the power of nanoparticles (NPs), especially magnetic NPs (MNPs) which can help treat TNBC patients. In the present study, zinc ferrite (ZFO) and lanthanum ferrite (LFO) MNPs were synthetized via co-precipitation method and then characterized for knowing their properties and behaviors. Several techniques were utilized for knowing the size, shape, surface and optical properties, magnetic and electron properties, and aggregation and stability. Once the characterization was completed, different cytotoxic assays were employed for knowing the potential toxicity of ZFO and LFO MNPs towards breast cancer cell lines. The occupied cell lines were breast adenocarcinoma cell (MCF-7), triple negative breast cancer (MDA-MB-231) and normal cell lines (HEK-293). The different results exhibit the MDA-MB-231 cell line as more susceptible to die once’s treated with the MNPs. vii Moreover, once the first step was completed, ZFO MNPs were coated with gold for making a more stable MNPs and then covered with folic acid (FA) and chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin (Dox). This procedure is intended to make an active targeting of the newly ZFO nanocomposite since the breast cancer cells have an overexpression of FA receptors. In addition, the nanocomposites are characterized for knowing if gold, FA, and Dox are attached to the ZFO MNPs. Then to know if this newly formed nanocomposite can deliver the Dox in the tumor area which has a specific pH, different experiments are completed. This will clear the idea if functionalized nanocomposites can travel towards the tumor area and deliver Dox into the cancerous cells achieving a higher mortality.