Exemestane loaded alginate nanoparticles for cancer treatment: Formulation and in vitro evaluation

Alginate, a biopolymer is most useful for anticancer drug delivery, because of it is biocompatible, nontoxic, biodegradable and exploiting ligand-receptor interaction. Breast cancer is spreading very fast due to the changing food habits and environmental causes. Exemestane (EXE) an oral chemotherapeutic drug was used to treat breast cancer, while loading EXE in alginate nanoparticles, the side effects which was faced during administration are expected to be reduced and control the release of exemestane. Thus, in the present study, an anticancer drug EXE was loaded into the Alginate nanoparticles (ALG-NPs) through simple controlled gelation method and evaluated in vitro to study the performance of ALG-NPs in delivering the anticancer drug EXE. The unloaded and loaded formulation was characterized by FT-IR, XRD and SEM studies. The encapsulation of Exemestane was confirmed using FTIR and XRD analysis results. The surface morphology, shape and size of the formulation was studied using SEM analysis and result reveals that the size was in nano size range with rough surface morphology. Encapsulation of EXE was studied by using UV-vis spectrophotometer. In vitro drug release studies implies that ALG-NPs acts as a novel drug delivery system for the effective controlled delivery for cancer treatment.