Abstract

BIOLOGICAL ACTIVITY OF INDOMETHACIN-LOADED NANOPARTICLES

Velichka Andonova*, Marian Draganov, Yana Feodorova, George Georgiev, Margarita Kassarova

Abstract

In addition to its well-known anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects, indomethacin (IMC) has been shown to reduce the proliferation rate and induce apoptosis in several cancer cell lines. In this study we investigated the biological activity of IMC and poly(vinyl acetate) nanoparticles with indomethacin (IMC-pVAc) in three cell lines. Treatment with IMC-pVAc caused prominent morphologic alterations of serum-free McCoy-Plovdiv and mouse lymphoma L5178Y cells. At least for the McCoy-Plovdiv line we showed that IMC doubtlessly induces apoptosis in the cells. The mouse lymphoma cells were more sensitive to IMC treatment which can be due to the different physiology of cancer cells and their shorter doubling time. In both cell lines, however, a clear concentration- and time-dependent effect of IMC treatment was demonstrated. Interestingly, IMC-pVAc always led to higher mortality of cells than IMC alone. This was not due to a cytotoxic activity of the nanoparticles. pVAc nanoparticles were shown to be biocompatible with respect to cell cultures and did not affect the proliferation rate and normal development of cells in vitro. Thus, the greater effect of IMC-pVAc could be explained with the prolonged release of the active substance, included in the polymer carrier.

Keywords: Indomethacin, indomethacin-loaded nanoparticles, apoptosis, biocompatibility, cell cultures.