Fe3O4 promoted metal organic framework MIL-100(Fe) for the controlled release of doxorubicin hydrochloride

Cancer, an irremediable disease has a less survival rate among the patients in worldwide. Conventional anticancer agents or medicines exhibit poor performance in targeted delivery and causes toxicity in body with doses. Recently, attempts were made to develop different nanocarriers for targeted release of the chemotherapeutic medicines to cancer cells. The important issues with the existing drug carriers lies on their poor loading capacity or premature release of the drug from the external surface. To address this issue, porous metal organic frameworks with greater tunability and high surface area may be more suitable for the drug delivery applications. In this work, a metal organic framework (MOF) MIL-100(Fe) and its composite with Iron oxide nanoparticles Fe3O4@MIL-100 were investigated as delivery agents for anticancer drug doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX). A series of composites with varying amounts of Fe3O4 were synthesized by adding different amount of Fe3O4 to the solvent mixture used for synthesis of the MOF MIL-100. The composites were characterized by various techniques like BET, TEM, FESEM, VSM and TGA to understand the effect of the nanoparticles in the MOF structure. The MOF and several Fe3O4@MIL-100 composites were then analyzed used to load the drug by equilibrating aqueous solution of DOX with the porous carriers. The highest DOX loading capacity (∼19 mass %) was observed for MIL-100 composites containing about 16 mass % of Fe3O4 particles. The release profiles of the DOX loaded carriers dispersed in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS, pH 7.4, 37 °C) indicate that the kinetics slow down after incorporation of the Fe3O4 nanoparticles.