Design of Peptide Hybrid Nanostructured Magnetic Materials for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Cell penetrating peptides have attracted much attention as a potential chemotherapeutics in recent years. However, there is a clear need to develop strategies to overcome the lack of target specificity. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNP), on the other hand represent a promising agents for specifically treating cancer cell by drug delivery and magnetic fluid hyperthermia. Also, magnetic nanoparticles functionalized with fluorescent dyes have been utilized for optical imaging as bio - labeling agents. In the present work, we aim to integrate the cell penetrating peptides attached to a fluorescent marker with magnetic nanoparticles. This allows us to get water dispersible peptide hybrid multifunctional magnetic nanostructures, suitable for biomedical applications particularly to specifically treat the cancerous cells. In this end, peptides of different functionality were systematically synthesized by solution and solid phase synthetic methods. The purity of different peptides was further characterized by MALDI / TOF and NMR spectra. The present study demonstrates a method to achieve water dispersible CoFe2O4 and γ-Fe2O3 nanoparticles by a thermal decomposition method using N-methyl 2-pyrrolidone (NMP) as solvent and peptides as a capping agent and a stabilizer. This will allow us to extend the same protocol to integrate iron oxide and cobalt ferrite nanoparticles with a fluorescent dye attached cell penetrating peptides, ideal for biomedical applications. The phase purity of the peptide hybrid nanostructured materials were examined by powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns. The structural and thermal behavior of the nanoparticles was further characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) respectively. The magnetization studies were carried out using a Quantum Design MPMS SQUID magnetometer. The presence of fluorescent dye was confirmed by UV-VIS and Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy.