ABSTRACT
Drug targeting to specific organs and tissues is one of the crucial endeavors of modern pharmacotherapy. Controlled targeting at the site of action and reduced time of exposure of non-targeted tissues increase the efficacy of the treatment and reduce toxicity and side effects, improving compliance and convenience. Nanocarriers based on the branched copolymers dextran- graft-polyacrylamide were synthesized and characterized and were tested on phagocytic cells. It was shown that these nanoparticles are actively captured by phagocytic cells, and that they are not cytotoxic (90% ± 2% live cells at 0.01 mkg/ml).
The polymer nanoparticles loaded with cisplatinum at different concentrations from 0.01 to 0.1 mkd/ml yielded a percentage of living cells between 28% and 76%. Taking into account that our nanoparticles will act mainly on malignant phagocytic cells and do not affect healthy cells, they can thus potentially be used for the therapeutic treatment of tumor cells having phagocytic activity.
