Synthesis, Characterization and Cytotoxicity Investigation of Chitosan-Amino Acid Derivatives Nanoparticles in Human Breast Cancer Cell Lines

Abstract

The presence of reactive primary amines in the backbone structure of chitosan enables the derivatization with different functional groups and thereby improving and expanding its properties, such as solubility and mucoadhesiveness, for biomedical applications. In this work, chitosan was grafted with different sources of amino acids (Histidine, Aspartic acid, Glutamic acid, Glycine-Aspartic acid, and Glycine-Glutamic acid), Chitosan and its grafted amino acid derivatives were obtained in very good yield, and they were characterized by Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), and the resulted spectra confirmed the right structures of chitosan and its different synthesized derivatives. The chitosan and its amino acid derivatives were converted to nanoparticles in size by subjecting them to the sonication method. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) was used to determine the shape and size of the prepared polymeric nanoparticles and the average nanoparticle size counted by the Image-J program. The micrographs revealed that the nanoparticles with spherical shapes and with different sizes were gained, but in general, they are less than 100nm in diameters. In vitro cytotoxicity of chitosan and chitosan derivatives prepared NPs were determined as MTT assay, against different three types of human breast cancer cell lines which are BT cell lines, MCF-7 cell lines, and SKBR3 cell lines. The cell proliferation of each type of breast cancer cell line has appeared to a highly significant decrease (p<0.001), with all types of tested NPs polymers in comparison with the positive control samples, through different periods of the experiment (24, 48, and 72 hours).