I thermo responsive small and polymeric amphiphiles for drug delivery

Abstract

Polymer based nanocarriers are emerging as important biomaterials for delivering anticancer drugs or genes to cancer tissues Polymeric drug carriers such as micelles vesicles and nanoparticles have been fabricated till date to achieve site specific drug delivery These nanocarriers have advantage of undergoing passive selective accumulation in tumor tissues through EPR effect The advent of stimuli responsive drug carriers has amplified the targeting ability and specificity of the nanocarriers In a view of designing stimuli sensitive polymeric vehicles the unusual physiochemical environments of the cancer tissues such as high temperature 40 43 61616 C acidic pH 6 1 to 6 8 over expression of enzymesand hypoxic conditions have been used as a trigger for releasing drug at cancer site Among all these stimuli based materials thermo sensitive polymers provide unique opportunity for delivering chemotherapeutic agents to tumor tissues without affecting the micro environment of tissues Unfortunately thermos responsive polymeric materials are much less explored compared to other stimuli based materials hence new smart amphiphilic designs both small and polymeric are required to accomplish better treatment for cancer therapy This thesis work is focused on the design and development of an efficient nanocarrier for targeting tumor or cancer cells using temperature as a stimulus for releasing the loaded cargoes Small amphiphilic molecules based thermo responsive scaffolds were synthesized in order to understand the role of hydrophobic and hydrophilic segments on the thermal behavior of their drug release mechanism These amphiphiles were designed with hydrophobic unit from renewable recourse 3 pendadecyl phenol which is one of the main constituent of cashew nut shell liquid The self assembled nanostructure formed from the amphiphile was further employed for loading fluorescent dyes and various anti cancer drugs SynopsisviiiThis thesis has been divided into five major chapters 1 Introduction Chapter Th newline newline