Targeted Delivery of 5-fu-loaded Quantum Dots Based System Into Cancer Induced Mice Using Receptor-based Chemistry; Effect on Adaptive Immune Responses

Adequate understanding of the basic chemistry involved in the etiology of cancer has unravelled the doggedness of cancer cells and paved ways for new strategies in cancer therapy and diagnosis. In response to this doggedness, cancer cellular interaction, and associated signaling components are recently utilized as a key underlining components for effective targeted cancer therapy. Anticancer drugs such as 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU), despite its anticancer property, are characterized to have some limitations associated to drug resistance, and still remains a significant limitation to it clinical use. The folate expressing potential of cancer cells leads to the development of folate affinity compounds in this study to aid in enhancing the uptake of cytotoxic drugs such as 5-FU and ameliorate its possible resistance/or toxicity index. To this end, Folate-receptor based chemistry was proposed in this work to effectively deliver a cytotoxic drug (5-FU) in to breast cancer cells in vivo. The 5-FU drug was loaded onto Mn-ZnS quantum dots (QDs) encapsulated with chitosan (CS) biopolymer and conjugated with folate receptor targeting ligands, folic acid (FA) following wet chemical method. Based on the results presented in this study, the immunophenotyping profiles (CD3, CD4, CD8 and NK-T) in the splenic tissues of cancer induced Balb/c mice were observed to have increased significantly (p