Functionalised gold nanoparticles loaded with methotrexate for the treatment of neuroblastoma: synthesis, characterisation, and in vitro study

Nanomaterials as drug delivery probes have shown great potential over time [1,2]. Herein, gold nanoparticles are used as a platform for the delivery of methotrexate (MTX), a drug which is used in a wide range of treatments, including cancer [3] and psoriasis [4]. In this work, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) functionalised with two different thiols, 3-mercaptopropane-1-sulfonate (3MPS) and 2-(diethylamino)ethanethiol (DEA) are synthesised following a single phase wet chemical reduction, using sodium borohydride as the reducing agent and the thiols as stabilisers. MTX was loaded on the synthesised nanoparticles following a previous report[5], the loading percentage was found to be >90% and the release over time negligible. Both the as-synthesised AuNPs and the drug loaded AuNPs have been extensively characterised by means of UV-visible spectroscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy, NMR, Dynamic Light Scattering, ζ-potential measurements, together with morphological characterisations such as TEM and SEM. A preliminary in vitro study was carried out to evaluate the biological activity of the drug loaded gold nanoparticles towards two different neuroblastoma cell lines, SJNKP and IMR5 with overexpressed c-Myc and two adenocarcinoma cell lines, LoVo and LoVo DX. [