Abstract:
Cancer and its reoccurrence have become a major health problem affecting the
quality of life for millions of individuals every year. The currently available strategies,
radiotherapy, and chemotherapy have non-specific targets, lower solubility, and severe
side effects. Hydrogels are crosslinked polymeric networks with higher swelling
properties, degradation, biocompatibility, and flexibility which can be manipulated based
on the desired application. Incorporating AV can elevate the antioxidant, and anticancer
properties of the hydrogel based drug delivery system (DDS) also warranting enhanced
swelling, drug release, and environmental degradability of the system. Acrylic acid (AA)
induces pH-responsive properties in the hydrogels. The PVA/SA and PVA/SA/AV
hydrogels were synthesized with a pH responsive behavior and investigated at different
pH conditions. The unloaded and loaded PVA/SA and PVA/SA/AV hydrogels with
imatinib (IM) were characterized for their structural morphology, physiochemical
characteristics, and antioxidant and anticancer activity. The IM loaded PVA/SA/AV
hydrogels showed increased pore size in SEM micrographs, enhanced swelling abilities
up to 400%, 100% degradation, 56% encapsulation efficiency, and drug release profiles
of up to 94% in 24 h, compared to PVA/SA hydrogels loaded with IM. Dpph radical
scavenging activity was also observed to be enhanced in PVA/SA/AV hydrogels. Finally,
the cell viability analysis in resistant MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines exhibited 41% cell
viability of the PVA/SA/AV hydrogels loaded with IM implying a promising potential of
AV to be incorporated in a hydrogel based drug delivery system for targeting drug
resistance in cancer.
