Abstract:
Most of the anticancer drugs are insoluble in water, unspecified to target site and degradable under acidic conditions in the stomach, resulting in decreasing their activities and increasing the side effects. To overcome these problems, drug delivery carriers were used to overcome these problems. Most of the drug delivery carriers were prepared by polymeric micelle systems. However, that of polymeric micelle systems are difficult to synthesize into the random polymers, where different units are aligned on a polymer chain in a random manner, immature drug-incorporation technology and possible chronic liver toxicity due to slow metabolic process. Therefore, the enhancement of anticancer drugs solubility, the pH-sensitive with safe, inexpensive condition and improvement of the selectivity were studied. Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) derivative self-assembly micelles have been proposed and investigated for their potential as drug carriers. In this work, EDTA was synthesized to present both hydrophobic moiety and cancer targeting moiety in order to create self-assembly micelles and increase selectivity to the cancer cell. The EDTA was modified with hydrophobic part (octadecyl bromide: Oc) and cancer targeting (folic acid: FA) to Oc-EDTA-FA. The structure, critical micelles concentration and the morphologies of Oc-EDTA-FA were characterized by spectroscopic methods and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The cytotoxicity of Oc-EDTA-FA self-assembly micelles as cancer drug delivery carriers was investigated by MTT assay. The results showed that Oc-EDTA-FA was successfully synthesized, self-assembled Oc-EDTA-FA micelles could be easily prepared by re-dispersion in distilled water and they were pH-sensitive and acid resistance. In addition, Oc-EDTA-FA carrier exhibited an effectiveness of cytotoxicity against cancer cells which showed the highest efficiency to the SW620 cancer cells over other cancer cells. The Oc-EDTA-FA@Cur carrier gave more specific to cancer cells than normal cells significantly. Therefore, the Oc-EDTA-FA self-assembled micelles were suitable to use in the application of drug delivery carrier.