Production of drug loaded nano hydroxyapatite drug delivery system for cancer treatment

Cancer is a disease that grows and spreads with uncontrolled proliferation of cells, and then leaves no room for normal cells, preventing the body from working as it should. Breast cancer is a type of cancer most commonly seen in women today, whose age of onset is decreasing from day to day and constituting 30% of all types of cancer that occur in women. Today, standard treatment methods such as surgical treatment, radiotherapy (radiotherapy), chemotherapy (drug therapy) and hormonotherapy (hormone therapy) are applied for breast cancer treatment. In addition, new methods continue to be investigated. Among the calcium phosphate ceramics, hydroxyapatite is the calcium salt of the chemical formula Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2 in the enamel and dentin layers of the bone and teeth. Hydroxyapatite has a hexagonal crystal structure. Furthermore, studies on the adsorption of various metals (such as lead, zinc, cadmium, cobalt, etc.) on a wide variety of pharmaceutical active substances, proteins, dyes, enzymes etc. due to the surface properties of hydroxyapatite reveal that HA ceramics are a very good adsorbent. In this context, the nano-sized hydroxyapatite-doxorubicin crystals obtained in the thesis study will be used as drug-delivery system. In this thesis, doxorubicin-loaded hydroxyapatite (HA) carriers were produced and characterized. Hydroxyapatite obtained by wet chemical method of calcium nitrate tetrahydrate, diammonium hydrogen phosphate and doxorubicin was used to produce nano-sized hydroxyapatite crystals by hydrothermal method and freeze-drying method, respectively. The synthesized nano-sized hydroxyapatite-doxorubicin crystals were characterized and tested for cytotoxicity in the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line. From the results obtained, it was observed that doxorubicin was successfully loaded onto hydroxyapatite crystals and that the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line had a higher killing effect than doxorubicin. Keywords: Breast cancer, drug, nanoparticle, hydroxyapatite, drug carrier, doxorubicin