pH-Responsive Delivery of Hydrophobic Anticancer Drugs Using Boron and Nitrogen Co-Doped Carbon Dots as Fluorescent Nanocarriers

Abstract In recent years, carbon dots have attracted a lot of attention among the nanocarbon family, due to their remarkable benefits and interesting properties like solubility, biocompatibility, tunable photoluminescence, and so forth. We can also design and synthesize carbon dots according to the capabilities that we expect from them (such as sensors, biosensors or drug delivery systems). In the current study, nitrogen and boron co-doped carbon dots (which is abbreviated as "NBCDs") were successfully used as efficient highly fluorescent nanocarrier to load two types of hydrophobic anticancer drugs including curcumin (CUR) and paclitaxel (PTX). The NBCDs were studied before and after conjugation with CUR and PTX drugs by spectroscopic techniques. After calculating drug loading capacity (LC%) and adsorption efficiency (AE%) for NBCDs nanocarriers, the drug release behavior from NBCDs was studied against two buffers (pH 5.0 and pH 7.4) as release media by dialysis bag method for 72 h. Finally, the pH-dependent release behavior of drugs was studied using several kinetic models.