Nanogels building with casein as smart carriers for enzyme-sensitive drug delivery system for cancer therapy

MATÍAS PICCHIO ; STEFANIE WEDEPOHL; MARCELO CALDERÓN; JULIO C. CUGGINO ; ROQUE MINARI; LUIS M. GUGLIOTTA; GREGOR NAGEL; CECILIA I. ALVAREZ IGARZABAL

Los Cocos, Cordoba

Simposio; XII Simposio Argentino de Polímeros - SAP 2017; 2017

The development of nanoscale drug delivery systems for cancer therapies is a challenge that has attracted increasing attention of the scientific community on the last years [1]. Due to the severe side effect of drugs currently used for cancer therapy, there is a necessity to find new drug delivery systems that transport and release the drug only at the tumor sites. After parenteral administration, the carrier should ideally transport the drug to the site of action (tumor) and release the drug only there. Recently, the stimuli responsive properties of nanogels have shown to be promising in order to control the unspecific release of drug before reaching the target diseased tissue [2][3]. Degradation of the nanogels after cell internalization is a smart strategy to deliver the drug only to tumor sites. It is known that Casein can be degraded by cathepsin B, which are overexpressed inside the lysosomes of cancer cells [4]. In this context, this work describes the synthesis and characterization of nanogels based in Casein crosslinked with dl-gliceraldehido and their evaluation as smart carrier for the catephpsin B sensitive intracellular drug delivery of oncological drugs. Nanogels prepared showed size of around 200 nm with good dispersability in water and are ideal candidates for their utilization as smart carriers for passive target and enzymatic sensitive release of oncological drugs for cancer therapy.