Adherence of paclitaxel drug in magnetite chitosan nanoparticles

Cancer treatment is a big challenge in medicine where chemotherapies and radiotherapies are aggressive and poorly effective having side effects as delirium, fatigue, insomnia, nausea and vomiting which are common problems for cancer patients. For this reason, during the last two decades, many researchers have developed several techniques to improve the current therapies; one of them is the functionalization of magnetic nanoparticles for drug delivery. In this work, magnetic nanoparticles with an average crystallite size 21.8 nm were covered in a core/shell type; magnetite/silica, magnetite/chitosan, and a double shell magnetite/silica/chitosan were developed for attaching an antineoplastic drug. The mechanism for the functionalization of the nanoparticles with a single and double shell was studied with Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The adherence of an antineoplastic drug, paclitaxel, onto functionalized nanoparticles was analyzed with a UV-Visible spectroscopy at a wavelength of 253 nm. It was found that the adherence of the drug is improved up to 18% when magnetite nanoparticles are coated with a single chitosan shell, and when the nanoparticles are coated with a silica/chitosan shell the adherence increases up to 29%.