TiO2-Based Nanocarriers for Drug Delivery

Abstract The use of nanotechnology in medical applications, generally known as “nanomedicine,” provides a wide variety of tools, devices, and therapies for treatment of dangerous human diseases. Nanoparticles of ultrasmall size are comparable to the naturally occurring proteins and biomolecules in the cell. These nanoparticles can change their structural, morphological, electrical, magnetic, and chemical properties, which allows them to interact in particular ways with cell biomolecules, thus enabling them to be physically transported into the interior structure of the cells. TiO2 nanoparticles can be effectively considered as one of the most promising candidates for biomedical applications because of their excellent properties such as nontoxicity, low cost, biosafety, and biocompatibility and their extensive usage in daily life as nanocarriers for drug-delivery purposes. In biomedical and cancer applications, TiO2 nanoparticles have attracted much attention, which can be mainly ascribed to the physical and chemical properties of these nanomaterials. In this chapter, the interactions of some important drugs with TiO2 nanoparticles are investigated using density functional theory calculations. Our results suggest that the TiO2 nanoparticle would be an ideal nanocarrier for drug-delivery systems. On the N-doped nanoparticles, the adsorption energies are higher than those on the undoped ones, and the adsorption process would be more energy favorable. The electronic properties of the complex systems are analyzed in view of the density of states and molecular orbitals. Thus, one efficient biocompatible and nontoxic semiconductor material is TiO2, which has found a wide range of applications as a nanocarrier for some of the important drugs in the human body.