Cytotoxic effect of paclitaxel loaded and surface coated polyacrylic acid-peg-chitosan based nanoparticles / Siti Muneerah Adenan

Paclitaxel (Taxol®) is a natural drug isolated from Ta.xus Brevifolia. It has been successfully used for the cancer treatment, especially breast and ovarian cancer. However, it is highly lipophilic and poor water solubility. To overcome these problems, it was formulated with non-aqueous vehicle containing Cremophor® EL, which consequently causes senous toxicity such as allergic reaction. Nowadays, nanotechnology had widely being exploited in anticancer research, and one of them is Paclitaxel. Development of new PTX formulation which gives better efficacy and fewer side effects becomes extremely urgent. Therefore, in this study, nanoparticle Polyacrylic acid-PEG-chitosan bound paclitaxel was developed and used as delivery system for PTX . The cytotoxicity of new formulation of paclitaxel was evaluated for in vitro anti­ tumour activity against MCF-7 cell lines by using SRB assay. The results from the present study demonstrated that nanoparticle Polyacrylic acid-PEG-chitosan bound paclitaxel developed cytotoxic effects against MC- 7 cells, although with high concentration compared to PTX. It also showed that the formulation alone also was able to act as anti-tumour agent. We did plan to test the novel formulation on the normal body cell, which are BJ cells in order to detect any negative impacts. However, the steps need to be terminated due to restriction of time.