Graphene Oxide Nanoplatforms to Enhance Cisplatin-Based Drug Delivery in Anticancer Therapy

Chemotherapeutics such as platinum-based drugs are commonly used to treat severalcancer types, but unfortunately, their use is limited by several side effects, such as high degradationof the drug before entering the cells, off-target organ toxicity and development of drug resistance.An interesting strategy to overcome such limitations is the development of nanocarriers that couldenhance cellular accumulation in target cells in addition to decreasing associated drug toxicity innormal cells. Here, we aim to prepare and characterize a graphene-oxide-based 2D nanoplatformfunctionalised using highly branched, eight-arm polyethylene-glycol, which, owing to its high numberof available functional groups, offers considerable loading capacity over its linear modalitiesand represents a highly potent nanodelivery platform as a versatile system in cancer therapy. Theobtained results show that the GO@PEG carrier allows for the use of lower amounts of Pt drugcompared to a Pt-free complex while achieving similar effects. The nanoplatform accomplishes verygood cellular proliferation inhibition in osteosarcoma, which is strictly related to increased cellularuptake. This enhanced cellular internalization is also observed in glioblastoma, although it is lesspronounced due to differences in metabolism compared to osteosarcoma. The proposed GO@PEGnanoplatform is also promising for the inhibition of migration, especially in highly invasive breastcarcinoma (i.e., MDA-MB-231 cell line), neutralizing the metastatic process. The GO@PEG nanoplatformthus represents an interesting tool in cancer treatment that can be specifically tailored to targetdifferent cancers.