Doxorubicin delivery to breast cancer cells with transferrin-targeted carbon quantum dots: An in vitro and in silico study

The proficient and targeted delivery (TD) of therapeutic drugs is a significant challenge in the clinical healing of cancer. In this study, highly luminescent carbon quantum dots (CQDs) were synthesized via citric acid carbonization and modified by transferrin (TF) to improve the water-solubility and increase the interaction ability with target cell receptors. The CQDs based nanocarrier was developed for the imaging and the TD of doxorubicin (Dox) as a model of anti-breast cancer drug. The physicochemical properties of Dox-loaded TF-CQDs were characterized using TEM, UV–Vis and FT-IR spectrophotometry, and fluorescence spectroscopy. The cytotoxicity potentiality of the nanocarrier was investigated by the MTT test across MCF-7 cell lines which exhibited more decrease in cell viability than TF-CQDs or Dox alone. The efficiency of the in vitro release was investigated in the optimum conditions of pH and the release time. The cellular uptake study revealed that TF-CQDs was more efficiently endocytosed by the MCF-7 cells than Dox. The Dox-TF conjugate was more toxic than Dox due to its overcome on multidrug resistance of cancer cells. Furthermore, the binding energy between Dox and TF-CQDs were investigated employing the molecular docking (Mdoc) approach. It was shown that Dox-TF-CQDs nano-carrier can be an excellent TD system for the therapy of breast cancer.