Carbohydrate coated, folate functionalized colloidal graphene as a nanocarrier for both hydrophobic and hydrophilic drugs

Abstract

Although graphene based drug delivery has gained significant recent interest, the synthesis of colloidal graphene based nanocarriers with high drug loading capacities and with targeting ligands at the outer surface is a challenging issue. We have synthesized carbohydrate coated and folate functionalized colloidal graphene which can be used as a nanocarrier for a wide variety of hydrophobic and hydrophilic drugs. The synthesized colloidal graphene is loaded with paclitaxol, camptothecin, doxorubicin, curcumin and used for their targeted delivery to cancer cells. We demonstrate that this drug loaded functional graphene nanocarrier can successfully deliver drugs into target cells and offers an enhanced therapeutic performance. The reported approach can be extended to the cellular delivery of other hydrophobic and hydrophilic drugs and the simultaneous delivery of multiple drugs.

Sodium alginate-functionalized nanodiamonds as sustained chemotherapeutic drug-release vectors

“…The family of nanocarriers include polymer, nano-liposome, carbon nanomaterials, and gold nanoparticles [3][4][5][6][7], while some of them still have safety concerns [8][9][10][11]. In addition, the intracellular retention time of drugs loaded by these nanomaterials is transient [12][13][14][15][16], which harmers their translation into further biomedical application.…”

Graphene Oxide-Gallic Acid Nanodelivery System for Cancer Therapy

“…The amphiphilic and planar structure of GO enable it to incorporate hydrophilic and/or hydrophobic biomolecules which gives the opportunity to prevent its instability in a medium [15, 18, 22]. In addition, the large surface area and oxygen-containing functional groups of GO such as phenol hydroxyl, epoxy, and carboxylic groups make it ideal for providing high drug loading efficiency, good dispersion, and easily functionalization [2, 23].…”

The effect of ligand density on in vivo tumor targeting of nanographene oxide

“…But, these nGO sheets were not stable in salt containing aqueous solution such as buffer or biological media. Normally, GO sheets are modified with polymers to increase their stability in the presence of salt and to use them for biological applications [9][10][11]13]. Pluronic F127 is a biocompatible tri-block copolymer which has been used to stabilize nGOs in biological solutions [14,26,27].…”

“…Several researchers have prepared folate conjugated GO and used them for targeted delivery of therapeutic drugs to the cancer cells [11,21,22]. Although it was observed that the cellular uptake of GO increased after folate conjugation, no systemic study on the effect of FA density on tumor targeting has been reported so far.…”

“…Single atom thick, two-dimensional GO or rGO sheets provide a very high specific surface area which is ideal for loading small molecule drugs as well as macromolecules such as proteins and DNA [9][10][11][12][13]. Physical interactions such as hydrophobic interactions, π-π stacking, hydrogen bonding, and electrostatic attractions were used to achieve a high drug loading on GO/rGO surfaces [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Biocompatible polymer modified GO/rGO sheets were efficient for transporting anticancer therapeutics into the cytoplasm of cancer cells [9,[12][13][14].…”