D-glucose functionalized β-cyclodextrin as a controlled anticancer drug carrier for in vitro evaluation

Today’s carbohydrate-based biomaterials have received more interest as anticancer drug carriers owing to their excellent biocompatibility, additionally; some of them have targeted drug delivery ability to the tumor cells. With considering these points, in this work, a new drug delivery platform fabricated through the selective grafting of D-glucose moiety on the primary face of β-cyclodextrin (β-CD-G) to obtain a full carbohydrate-based structure benefits from targeted drug delivery capability of glucose and a special structure of β-cyclodextrin (β-CD). The Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy outcome approved the success in the pure β-CD-G synthesis. In the following, respectively about 68 and 82.8% of methotrexate (MTX) and doxorubicin (DOX) separately were loaded on β-CD-G. Then the drug release profile studied in a pH and time-dependent procedure. Biological assays confirmed the biocompatibility of β-CD-G. The summation of the obtained results demonstrated that the synthesized β-CD-G could be suggested as an efficient delivery system for different cancer drugs with targeted delivery potential. Graphical abstract