Tóm tắt

Graphene and its derivatives with exceptional properties are being exploited for drug delivery and even com-bined therapies for enhanced antitumor activity and reduced side effects. However, the unfavorable surfacernchemistry of pristine graphene and reduced graphene oxide made them take covalent and non-covalent func-tionalization strategies to improve their biocompatibility. Although graphene oxide (GO) is soluble in waterrnowing to its oxygen-containing groups such as carboxylic acid and hydroxyl groups, it is highly accepted when tornbe modified to improve its colloidal stability in physiological buffers in the presence of salts. In this work, wernfunctionalized GO with Pluronic F127 molecules via non-covalent interaction and found that GO and PF127/GOrnnanohybrid with a concentration lower than 5 μg/ml have no obvious toxic effect on human astrocytes (AS) andrnhuman glioma (U251) cells. Anti-tumor drug doxorubicin (DOX) being loaded onto the PF127/GO nanocarriersrnby π-π stacking exhibited a high loading capacity of 0.83 mg/mg and loading efficiency of 83%. Our studyrnconfirmed that the PF127/GO/DOX (PGD) induced a higher apoptosis rate (12.27 ± 0.06%) of U251 cells thanrnthat of free DOX (8.20 ± 0.06%) (P< 0.05). Western blotting results indicated that PGD affected the MAPKrnsignaling pathway and induced the intrinsic pathway of apoptosis for the activation of Caspase-3 in U251 cells,rnwhich may provide more evidence for the signal pathway of tumor-targeting therapy