In situ synthesized lactobionic acid conjugated NMOFs, a smart material for imaging and targeted drug delivery in hepatocellular carcinoma.

Development of multifunctional nanoscale materials for targeted drug delivery in liver tumor cells has been realized in this work. Recently, nanoscale metal organic frameworks (NMOFs) have been used as a potential drug carrier for its unique characteristic properties. Here we have demonstrated a single step approach for the fabrication of lactobionic acid (LA) modified NH2-MIL-53(Al) NMOFs via green synthetic process. The anticancer drug doxorubicin (DOX) is loaded for targeted delivery in hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines (HepG2). The LA-targeted NMOFs have no cytotoxicity in both normal and hepatocellular cell lines. Human hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines are enriched of asialoglycoprotein receptors and simultaneously LA has strong recognition ability towards this receptor. The MTT assay reveals the DOX loaded LA-embedded NMOFs show greater cytotoxicity towards HepG2 cell lines in compare to normal cell lines. The FACS study also indicates that DOX-loaded LA-targeted NMOFs show greater cell death than bare NMOFs. More importantly, the NH2-MIL-53 NMOFs possess inherent fluorescent property and also the fluorescence intensity remains unaltered after conjugation of LA. So, the developed LA-embedded multifunctional NMOFs have good therapeutic efficacy for cell imaging and targeted drug delivery.