Self-assembled formation of chondroitin sulfate-based micellar nanogel for curcumin delivery to breast cancer cells.

Nanogel based drug delivery systems have been broadly used for cancer treatment. In this research, octadecylamine was grafted to chondroitin sulfate using three different mole ratios (10, 20, and 30) and named CS-ODA1, 2, and 3, respectively. The amide bond formation between chondroitin sulfate and octadecylamine was confirmed by 1H-nuclear magnetic resonance (HNMR) in the CS-ODA3 sample; therefore, further analysis was performed on this sample. Curcumin was loaded at defined Cur/CS-ODA ratios (5, 10 and 15%) and CS-ODA3 with 10% curcumin was selected for further experiments due to more entrapment efficiency (79.56% ± 5.56). In vitro release profile of the curcumin loaded nanogels showed >80% release after 70 h. In addition, the results of MTT analysis on the MCF-7 cell line showed almost no toxicity toward blank nanogels, while curcumin-loaded nanogels induced significant death after 24 h. In the end, analysis of the cell cycle using MCF-7 cells also confirmed the cytotoxicity of curcumin loaded nanogels. This study also showed that the presence of curcumin loaded chondroitin sulfate nanogels could successfully increase cellular uptake in comparison with free curcumin. The synthesized nanogels containing curcumin are expected to be effective for further studies in cancer treatment.