New ZnFe2O4@SiO2@graphene quantum dots as an effective nanocarrier for targeted DOX delivery and CT-DNA binder

Recent advances in biomedical applications of carbon and graphene quantum dots: A review

The carbon-based nanostructures have led to the development of theranostic nanoplatforms for simultaneous diagnosis and therapy due to their effective cell membrane-penetration ability, low degree of cytotoxicity, excellent pore volume, substantial chemical stability, and reactive surface. In the last few years, extensive efforts were made to design multifunctional nanoplatform strategies based on carbon nanostructures, involving multimodal imaging, controlled drug release capabilities, sensing in vitro, efficient drug loading capacity, and therapy. Carbon and graphene quantum dots (CQDs and GQDs) were the recent entrants, contingently being assessed for drug delivery and bioimaging. With the advancements, these quantum dots have ignited remarkable research interest and are now widely evaluated for diagnosis, bioimaging, sensing, and drug delivery applications. The last decade has witnessed their remarkable electrical, optical, and biocompatible properties since their inception. It is presumed that both of them have high potential as drug carriers and would serve as the next generation of approaches to address numerous unresolved therapeutic challenges. This review examined the recent advances of CQD and GQD based drug delivery applications, challenges, and future perspectives to pave the way for further studies in the future.

Nanoparticle-based materials in anticancer drug delivery: Current and future prospects

The past decade has witnessed a breakthrough in novel strategies to treat cancer. One of the most common cancer treatment modalities is chemotherapy which involves administering anti-cancer drugs to the body. However, these drugs can lead to undesirable side effects on healthy cells. To overcome this challenge and improve cancer cell targeting, many novel nanocarriers have been developed to deliver drugs directly to the cancerous cells and minimize effects on the healthy tissues. The majority of the research studies conclude that using drugs encapsulated in nanocarriers is a much safer and more effective alternative than delivering the drug alone in its free form. This review provides a summary of the types of nanocarriers mainly studied for cancer drug delivery, namely: liposomes, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, magnetic nanoparticles, mesoporous nanoparticles, gold nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes and quantum dots. In this review, the synthesis, applications, advantages, disadvantages, and previous studies of these nanomaterials are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the future opportunities and possible challenges of translating these materials into clinical applications are also reported.

Chirality-enhanced transport and drug delivery of graphene nanocarriers to tumor-like cellular spheroid

Chirality, defined as "a mirror image," is a universal geometry of biological and nonbiological forms of matter. This geometry of molecules determines how they interact during their assembly and transport. With the development of nanotechnology, many nanoparticles with chiral geometry or chiroptical activity have emerged for biomedical research. The mechanisms by which chirality originates and the corresponding synthesis methods have been discussed and developed in the past decade. Inspired by the chiral selectivity in life, a comprehensive and in-depth study of interactions between chiral nanomaterials and biological systems has far-reaching significance in biomedicine. Here, we investigated the effect of the chirality of nanoscale drug carriers, graphene quantum dots (GQDs), on their transport in tumor-like cellular spheroids. Chirality of GQDs (L/D-GQDs) was achieved by the surface modification of GQDs with L/D-cysteines. As an in-vitro tissue model for drug testing, cellular spheroids were derived from a human hepatoma cell line (i.e., HepG2 cells) using the Hanging-drop method. Our results reveal that the L-GQDs had a 1.7-fold higher apparent diffusion coefficient than the D-GQDs, indicating that the L-GQDs can enhance their transport into tumor-like cellular spheroids. Moreover, when loaded with a common chemotherapy drug, Doxorubicin (DOX), via π-π stacking, L-GQDs are more effective as nanocarriers for drug delivery into solid tumor-like tissue, resulting in 25% higher efficacy for cancerous cellular spheroids than free DOX. Overall, our studies indicated that the chirality of nanocarriers is essential for the design of drug delivery vehicles to enhance the transport of drugs in a cancerous tumor.

Graphene quantum dots based MnFe2O4@SiO2 magnetic nanostructure as a pH-sensitive fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) system to enhance the anticancer effect of the drug

Among the various methods of targeted drug delivery, magnetic nanoparticles been considered for a long time due to local drug delivery, reduction of side effects, and controlled drug release. In this work, fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) system MnFe₂O₄@SiO₂@ graphene quantum dots /DAU with 49.08 emu^-1 magnetism was prepared as pH-sensitive nanoplatform to enhance the anti-cancer effect of daunorubicin (DAU) drug (in the obtained FRET system, DAU act as acceptor molecule and graphene quantum dots act as donor molecule). The efficiency of the drug loaded on the nanoplatform in vitro is 78%. DAU drug release from nanoplatform at pHs of 7.4 and 5.5 during 48 h is 21% and 60%, respectively. Release sensitive to pH facilitates the application of prepared nanoplatform for DAU delivery. The results of MTT-assay and annexin V-FITC/PI show that MnFe₂O₄@SiO₂@ graphene quantum dots /DAU induces cell apoptosis by inhibiting the growth of more than 95% of MCF-7 cells. Also, according to the results, it was found that MnFe₂O₄@SiO₂@ graphene quantum dots /DAU can inhibit 66.65% cell cycle in the sub-G1 phase. Therefore, due to the anti-cancer activity of MnFe₂O₄@SiO₂@ graphene quantum dots /DAU, this biological nanoscale can be considered a candidate for drug delivery.