Green synthesized-silver nanoparticles coated with targeted chitosan nanoparticles for smart drug delivery

The ever-increasing rate of people with colon cancer due to inappropriate diet and pollution in the industrial world leads to practical attempts by scientists to arrest it. In this work, we developed folic acid (FA) function-alized chitosan (CS) nanoparticles to co-delivery of imatinib (I) and silver (Ag) nanoparticles to HCT116 colon cancer cells. After efficient synthesis of FA-CS-Ag-I nanocomposite, various analytical devices including FT-IR, XRD, DLS, TEM, and SEM were used for qualification and quantification of the nanocomposite. Drug release study was demonstrated controlled release in normal pH (less than 20% after 24 h) and fast release in pH 5.0 (about 80% release after 24 h). In biomedical tests, MTT assay indicated excellent suppression against cancer cells, about 20% cell viability after 24 h of incubation with 20 nM concentration while it was over 70% cell viability for HFF1 cell at the same conditions. The BAX, Bcl2, BECLIN1, mTORC1 and ATG5 gene expression (for instance, a 5-fold and a 3-fold increase in expression of BAX and mTORC1 after incubation with 5 nM of FA-CS-Ag-I, respectively), apoptosis (65% and 42% apoptosis for Ag and FA-CS-Ag-I samples, respectively), and cell cycle arrest (24% and 12% cell cycle arrest for Ag and FA-CS-Ag-I samples, respectively) analyses have further confirmed the apoptosis-inducing ability of FA-CS-Ag-I and even Ag nanoparticles. These data have been depicted that FA-CS-Ag-I can potentially apply for active delivery of therapeutics against colon cancer.