Abstract
Lung cancer is a main global health problem with high incidence and case-fatality rates. The use of solid lipid nanoparticles (SLN) as a nanocarrier for chemotherapeutic agents has been suggested as an effective therapeutic approach. The current work objective was to investigate the antineoplastic activity of gemcitabine (GM) and oxaliplatin (OXA) co-loaded into oleic acid-based solid lipid nanoparticle (OA-SLN) in A549 non-small cell lung cancer cells. OA-SLN was synthesized using homogenization and physically characterized using the dynamic light scattering techniques. The anticancer properties of the combination of GM and OXA encapsulated in OA-SLN were evaluated using a series of cellular assays, such as cell viability using crystal violate, apoptosis using caspase-3 assay kit, and autophagy using human autophagy-related protein LC3-B ELISA kit. The z-average diameter of (GM+OXA) OA-SLN was (63.10 +/- 1.53 nm). The (GM+OXA) OA-SLN formulation had significantly reduced cell growth in a dose-dependent manner on the A549 cells within 24 hours. The combination (GM+OXA) OA-SLN had more pronounced effects on autophagy (326.38 +/- 4.21 pg/ml) than the untreated control cells (206.2 +/- 6.69 pg/ml). Our findings indicate that co-encapsulation of GM and OXA into OA-SLN significantly improved their therapeutic efficacy against A549 cells.