Comparative Cytotoxicity and Genotoxicity Assessments of Chitosan Amino Acid Derivative Nanoparticles toward Human Breast Cancer Cell Lines

Chitosan, a natural macromolecule, is widely used in medical and pharmaceutical fields because of its distinctive properties such as a bactericide, fungicide and above all its antitumour effects. In this study; we aimed to develop an antitumour system based on Chitosan (Cs)and its some amino acid derivatives, namely Chitosan-Arginine (Cs-Arg) and Chitosan-Clycine-Aspartic acid (Cs-Gly-Asp)derivatives nanoparticles to improve their bioavailability and anticancer activity in antitumour treatments. The derivatives were obtained in a very good yield, and they were characterized by FTIR and some of them characterized by 1H-NMR, and the resulted spectra confirmed the right structures of synthesized chitosan derivatives. All the chitosan and its grafted amino acids 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 they developed using the ImageJ program. The MTT assay and the flow cytometry technique for all prepared polymeric nanoparticles were determined against three different types of human breast cancer cell lines, and the results revealed the highly significant (p< 0.001), in the reducing of breast carcinoma viability in comparison with untreated cell lines, but the cytotoxicity effect of Cs-Arg nanoparticles were larger than Cs-Gly-Asp nanoparticles, whereas there was no genotoxicity effect against BT cell lines for the Cs-Gly-Asp nanoparticles and slight effect for Cs-Arg nanoparticles.