Pluronic – Grafted Copolymers as Nanoplatforms for Effectively Delivering Hydrophobic Anticancer Drugs

Abstract

Several kinds of anticancer drugs have significantly contributed in cancer therapy but these drugs exhibited several side-effect. There has recently been an emerging approach in drug development by which efficient exploitation of using nanocarriers. The drug delivery nanocarriers are considering as a sustainable and innovative development. In these studies, two kinds of pluronic-conjugated polymers were prepared in a green synthetic process via conjugate of thermosensitive copolymer pluronic F127 (F127) derivative onto amine-functionalized generation 4.0 polyamidoamine (PAMAM G4.0) dendrimer or heparin. The pluronic–functionalized polymers (G4.0-F127 and Hep-F127) were characterized by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), Gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), which revealed that size of these nanocarriers were below 180 nm in diameter. The G4.0-F127 nanocarriers exhibited a high entrapment-efficiency (EE) of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), approximately 71.35±1.75% of fed drug, which was significantly higher than that of PAMAM G4.0 at 42.18±1.89% and F127 at 18.75±2.25%. For Hep-F127, the nanocarriers exhibited a high drug loading efficiency with 5-FU, Erlotinib hydrochloride (Erlo) and Cisplatin (Cis) at 37°C. Releasing studies indicated that the nanocarriers could be used for delivering several kinds of hydrophobic drugs and the drug-loaded systems have showed a significantly antiproliferative activity. The obtained results demonstrated that F127-conjugated polymers could be potential nanocarriers for drug delivery systems.