Triple Surfactant Assisted Synthesis of Novel Core-Shell Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles with High Surface Area for Drug Delivery for Prostate Cancer
Steffi Tiburcius, Kannan Krishnan, Vaishwik Patel, Jacob Netherton, CI Sathish, Judith Weidenhofer, Jae‐Hun Yang, Nicole Beydon, Ajay Karakoti, Ajayan Vinu
Abstract
Abstract Core-shell mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN) have recently emerged as a promising drug delivery system that can be used for loading large quantities of different types of drugs or creating a stimuli responsive system. However, achieving this unique core-shell morphology with smaller size, high specific surface area, and large pore volume is highly challenging. In this study, we report the synthesis of core-shell MSN using a triple surfactant assisted soft-templating approach. We show that the size, morphological and textural properties of the core-shell structures can be easily modified by controlling the amount of fluorocarbon-4 surfactant. The optimised core shell MSN showed the highest surface area of 1496 m2/g that helped in achieving a high drug loading of model drugs doxorubicin (34%) or docetaxel (50%). The small size of core-shell MSN facilitated its rapid uptake within the PC-3 cells within 12 h. The cytotoxicity data using drug loaded MSN showed high cytotoxicity in both PC-3 and LNCaP cell lines suggesting that this versatile platform is efficient in delivering different drugs to various cell types. This unique triple surfactant assisted synthesis of core-shell MSN will open the door for multifaceted applications in imaging and drug delivery.