CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Peptide active ingredients are playing a key role trying to attend several health-endangering diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, infectious conditions and autoimmune disorders1,2. Significant progress has been made in the development of new pharmaceutical technology platforms based on different types of systems3. In particular, polymeric microparticles (MPs) are micron size entities which can be made from a wide variety of natural and synthetic polymers. Due to particle?s ability to improve the efficiency of current therapeutic treatments, this systems are being extensively studied and used as drug carriers in the field of biomaterials, medicine and pharmacy.Considering polylactic acid (PLA) capability for high loading drugs, the goal of this work attempts to study the properties of MPs containing Ɛ-polylysine (PLL) loaded into a matrix blend polymer/co-polymer composed by PLA and poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) for cancer therapy.The PLL-loaded PLA/PEG-b-PLA MPs were prepared using a proprietary electrohydrodynamic technology. Briefly, for all MPs, organic solutions containing all necessary components were processed by this technology resulting in a dry collection of the specified MPs. The particles were characterized by thermo gravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, scanning electron microscopy, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. UV-Vis spectrophotometry was used to determine the encapsulation efficiency of the obtained system. In vitro cytotoxicity assays against human pancreatic carcinoma cell lines BxPC3 and MIA PaCa2 were performed.The MPs exhibit thermal stability and have a high percentage of PLL loaded (81%). The in vitro cytotoxic assays of free PLL and PLL-loaded PLA/PLA-b-PEG MPs showed similar cytotoxicity at the same concentration of PLL, and the cell viabilities were significantly lower than cell control group (p