Synthesis and characterization of pH-sensitive magnetic nanoparticles as drug carriers for sustained and controlled release of MTX

Nowadays, effective cancer treatment is still one of the most challenging missions in the scientific community. A primary limitation to most conventional anticancer drugs is their adverse uptake by normal tissues, fast metabolism and lack of tumour cell targeting property. One way to overcome these disadvantages is the application of nanoparticles as the carriers of widely known therapeutic substances. In this work, we devoted our efforts to prepare pH-sensitive magnetic nanoparticles as drug carriers for sustained and controlled release of methotrexate (MTX) via self-assembly of MgAl-LDH and Fe3O4 nanoparticles, which is an economic and environmentally friendly process, and also investigated the physical and chemical properties as well as the drug release performance. We further found that the carriers had a suitable size, good stability and magnetic responsibility; the MTX successfully loaded onto the carriers at a drug loading efficiency of 89.16%. In addition, the in vitro drug release studies showed that the MTX-carriers had excellent pH-sensitivity, 86.21% of MTX was released within 48 h at pH 3.5. Moreover, the MTT assays in cancer cells (HepG2) demonstrated that MTX-carriers exhibited high anticancer activity while the carriers were practically non-toxic.