Data from National Institute of Cancer show an increase of 14.1 million new cases of cancer over the world in 2012, and the estimate for 2014/2015 in Brazil points to over 500,00 new cases. Thus, research focused on the production of nanoparticles and hydrogels, consisting by natural or synthetic polymers, are important for the development of systems for controlled release of antitumoral drugs. Therefore, this study aimed to produce systems based on hydrophilic derivative of chitosan, N,O-methoxy(polyethyleneglycol)-g-chitosan, for the encapsulation and release of antitumor drugs. The structural and physicochemical characteristics of the chitosan and the polymers were analyzed by FTIR, 1 H NMR, solubility as function of pH, viscosimetry, XRD and TGA. The parent chitosan with different average degrees of deacetylation and viscosimetric average molecular weight, QD1x (