Development of nanosized drug carrier systems usable in chemotherapy applications and in vitro investigation in breast cancer treatments

Due to those conventional methods like chemotherapy, and radiotherapy used in the treatment of breast cancer were not directly or indirectly target the tumor area and serious side effects of these strategies causing lethal health issue. Targeting drugs in capsules to the tumor site has attracted considerable attention as a new and promising approach to overcome the adverse severe side effects. Polymeric drug delivery systems to encapsulate Doxorubicin, a chemotherapeutic agent used in the treatment of breast cancer, were developed within the scope of this thesis. Here, three different structures of drug carrier systems, PANPs, BANPs and EANPs, were produced by double emulsion solvent evaporation method, by performing method optimization from the copolymers synthesized as a result of PEGylation of polyadipates, pPAd, pBAd and pEAd using mPEG-550. These nanocarriers produced with the optimized method were loaded with DOX and their encapsulation efficiencies were calculated as 57%, 58% and 44.5%, respectively. In vitro cytotoxicity analyses of free-DOX, non-drug-loaded nanocarriers, and DOX-loaded nanocarriers were tested in breast cancer cell lines, MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231. The results demonstrated that the nanoparticles exhibited low cytotoxicity and could be used as a drug delivery system. Physical, chemical, and cell culture data showed that PANPs, BANPs, and EANPs nanoparticles produced within the scope of the thesis have the ability to be new drug delivery systems that may be used in breast cancer treatment.