Issue 35, 2023

Polymer–nucleobase composites for chemotherapy drug capture

Abstract

Intravenous chemotherapy (e.g., doxorubicin (DOX)) is standard treatment for many cancers but also leads to side effects due to off-target toxicity. To address this challenge, devices for removing off-target chemotherapy agents from the bloodstream have been developed, but the efficacy of such devices relies on the ability of the underlying materials to specifically sequester small-molecule drugs. Anion-exchange materials, genomic DNA, and DNA-functionalized iron oxide particles have all been explored as drug-capture materials, but cost, specificity, batch-to-batch variation, and immunogenicity concerns persist as challenges. Here, we report a new class of fully synthetic drug-capture materials. We copolymerized methacrylic acid and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate in the presence of several nucleobases and derivatives (adenine, cytosine, xanthine, and thymine) to yield a crosslinked resin with nucleobases integrated into the material. These materials demonstrated effective DOX capture: up to 27 mg of DOX per g of material over 20 minutes from a phosphate-buffered saline solution with an initial concentration of 0.05 mg mL−1 of DOX. These materials use only the individual nucleobases for DOX capture and exhibit competitive capture efficacy compared to previous materials that used genomic DNA, making this approach more cost-effective and reducing potential immunological concerns.

Graphical abstract: Polymer–nucleobase composites for chemotherapy drug capture

  • This article is part of the themed collection: #MyFirstJMCB

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
12 Apr. 2023
Accepted
07 Aug. 2023
First published
15 Aug. 2023

J. Mater. Chem. B, 2023,11, 8449-8455

Polymer–nucleobase composites for chemotherapy drug capture

G. A. Su, O. J. Wadsworth, H. S. Muller, W. R. Archer, S. W. Hetts and M. D. Schulz, J. Mater. Chem. B, 2023, 11, 8449 DOI: 10.1039/D3TB00819C

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