Fabrication and characterization of novel gelatin/alginate-based nanosystems as promising antiviral agents

Traditional antiviral therapies face several limitations, including drug resistance, toxicity, and limited efficacy against emerging viral strains. Therefore, there are pressing needs to develop innovative, non-toxic, and affordable antiviral therapies. This investigation aimed to develop two different alginate-based nanosystems for use as potent antiviral candidates. The key objectives include the preparation of ZnONPs-loaded Ca-alginate and ZnONPs-loaded gelatin/alginate nanocapsules, which displayed encapsulation efficacy of 75.4 % and 99.7 %, respectively. Different characterization techniques were employed, including SEM, TEM, FTIR, EDX, zeta potential, and nano-size analysis. Antiviral assays displayed that, ZnONPs-loaded gelatin/alginate nanocapsule exhibited the highest virucidal efficacy against Human adenovirus (HAdV-7), HSV-1 and HSV-2, and Coxsackievirus-A16 (CV-A16) with IC₅₀ values of 0.22, 0.27, 0.47 and 0.51 μg/mL, respectively. ZnONPs-loaded Ca-alginate nanocapsule displayed the most pronounced blocking efficacy against HAdV-7, and CV-A16 with IC₅₀ values of 0.28, and 0.08 μg/mL. However, ZnONPs-loaded alginate/gelatin nanocapsule was the most significant in inhibiting HSV-1, HSV-2, and HAdV-7 replication with IC₅₀ values of 0.73, 0.40, and 0.38 μg/mL, respectively. This is the first study resulted in the effective development of innovative formulations involving the synthesis of ZnONPs-loaded Ca-alginate versus alginate/gelatin systems that exhibited improved safety profiles while simultaneously maintaining sufficient antiviral efficacy attributable to their inherent biological characteristics.