Folate-modified and curcumin-loaded dendritic magnetite nanocarriers for the targeted thermo-chemotherapy of cancer cells

AbstractA novel multifunctional nanoplatform constructed from methoxy-PEGylated poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM) generation 3 dendrimers with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) entrapped in their core, containing curcumin as the payload drug and folic acid (folate) as the targeting ligand (abbreviated as FA-mPEG-PAMAM G3-CUR@SPIONs), is presented in this study. SPIONs entrapped in the core of the nanocomplex may act as a hyperthermia agent and generate localized heat upon excitation with an alternating magnetic field (AMF), thus enabling a thermo-chemotherapy strategy for cancer treatment. Accordingly, the cytotoxic effect and the mode of cell death triggered by the nanocomplex in combination with AMF were evaluated on two different cancer cell lines with various folate receptor (FR) expression levels, including KB nasopharyngeal cancer cells overexpressing FRs as the model and MCF-7 breast cancer cells with low level of FRs as the blank sample. The obtained results showed that KB cell death was ...