Synthesis of Novel Chitosan-Grafted-Derivatives Nano Cationic Polymers as Antitumor Agents

Abstract

Chitosan obtained from isolated chitin of shrimp shells by a modified chemical method with a high degree of deacetylation to improve its solubility. This was undergoing a graft copolymerization process to prepare acetyl chitosan (NACS), acetyl chitosan grafted polylactide (NACS-g-PLA), chitosan grafted polylactide (CS-PLA), and polylactide chitosan grafted poly(ethylene glycol) (CS- PLA-g-PEG) nanoparticles. They characterized by FT-IR and 1HNMR. Chitosan and its derivative nanoparticles morphology examined using SEM and average nanoparticle size counted by ImageJ program. After treatment with chitosan derivative nanoparticles (1 mg/mL) at various time intervals (24, 48 and 72 hour) for three different models of human breast cancer cell lines which are BT, MCF-7 and SKBR3 cell lines, the cell proliferation, cell viability percentage, and genotoxicity as a DNA fragmentation index (%DFI) were analysed by MTT assay, and flow cytometry techniques. The results displayed that CSNPs and its derivatives NACS-g-PLA, CS-g-PLA NPs, and CS- PLA-g-PEG, have strong antitumor activities by inducing in vitro treated BT, MCF-7, and SKBR3 cell lines as a highly significant effect, (p < 0.001) on cell proliferation growth as observed with untreated control cells in a different pattern. Furthermore, it can be said since genotoxicity results that prepared polymers NPs were considered as slight /or no effect on the nucleic material of the BT cell lines, as demonstrated as %DFI in compare with positive and negative control samples.