Friday, October 28, 2011
Hall 1-2 (San Jose Convention Center)
Nanoparticles can prolong the circulation time of conventional anti-cancer drugs and increase the solubility of these drugs. Furthermore, nanoparticles have been shown to efficiently deliver anti-cancer drugs to the tumor site because of the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect. The ideal size of the nanoparticles should be 10-100 nm to take full advantage of the EPR effect. We developed a novel type of nanogel comprising of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and cross-linkers to load anti-cancer drugs like doxorubicin (DOX) in order to effectively deliver these drugs to the tumor site. We hypothesized that these nanogels will be stable under physiological conditions and can be triggered to release drug under acidic conditions. We synthesized a series of nanogels with different sizes by varying the size of the PVA as well as the types and ratios of the cross-linkers (two arms, three arms and four arms). The unloaded drugs were removed by running the drug loaded nanogel through centrifugal filter devices. The drug-loaded nanogel on the filters was recovered with PBS. MTS assay will be used to evaluate the cytotoxicity of the blank PVA and drug-loaded nanogel against A549, non-small, cell lung cancer cells. Our data shows that the larger PVA and the negatively charged PVA resulted in higher loading capacity for DOX.