Design, in silico modeling, biodistribution study of rutin and quercetin loaded stable human hair keratin nanoparticles intended for anticancer drug delivery

Abstract

Current drug development using functional polymers is one of the major tasks for enhancing effectiveness and reducing the side effects in cancer therapeutics. To achieve this immense goal, human hair keratin and model drugs rutin-quercetin (Ru-Qr) were chosen to formulate nanoparticles (NPs). Drug delivery is a core path to produce significant biological activity, and in this connection, the current study was designed to produce highly stable Ru-Qr NPs and their characterization such as the encapsulation of Ru-Qr, the nature, molecular shape, particle size, stability and polydispersity index by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and Zetasizer analyzer. Based on a literature report, the drug targets 521P and 5P21 were chosen to perform in silico study. The observed in silico study reports showed the strong interaction of NPs and binding pockets of H-Ras P21 proto-oncogene. In this respect, the importance of NPs prompted us to study the biodistribution and in vitro anticancer activity by using cancer cell lines. The investigation of biodistribution showed that it penetrated after 3 d of injection, up to 14% in the liver, 18% in the kidneys, 8% in the spleen, 3% in the heart and 0% in the brain. At 50 μg ml−1 concentration, the NPs displayed 78.02% viability in the normal liver cell line and 95.60% cytotoxicity in the HeLa cell line. The obtained results showed the active NPs enhancing controlled, site-specific drug delivery and they can serve as a novel nanodrug in the management of cancer.