Magnesium hydroxide nanoplates: a pH-responsive platform for hydrophobic anticancer drug delivery

Abstract

The cost of conventional chemotherapeutic drugs is substantially high, and biomedical researchers are constantly hunting for cheap and effective chemotherapeutic alternatives. Recently, curcumin has emerged as a cost effective anticancer remedy, however, the low bioavailability of curcumin has been a major impediment to its successful utilization for disease management. In this work, we developed a highly biocompatible magnesium hydroxide as an intelligent nanocarrier for delivering curcumin into cancer cells. Curcumin was loaded onto magnesium hydroxide nanoplates via a complexation strategy. Furthermore, these drug conjugated nanoparticles not only achieve efficient loading of a highly hydrophobic drug, but also exhibit pH responsive release in extracellular or intracellular acid environments, validated by in vitro drug release, confocal microscopy and MTT assay. These biocompatible nanoplates can be promising candidates for the further development of smart drug delivery nanodevices.