Engineered Carbon Nanotubes as Drug Delivery Systems for Antiviral Drugs

Among the different types of nanomaterials, Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs), due to their unique physical, chemical and physiological properties, have shown great performance in the field of nanomedicine, attracting particular attention as carriers of biologically relevant molecules. These nanomaterials can be surface engineered in order to enhance their dispersibility in the aqueous phase or to provide, by multimodal conjugation, the appropriate functional groups for the synthesis of CNT-based drug delivery system (DDS) able to bind the desired therapeutic material or the target tissue to obtain a therapeutic effect [1,2]. In the nanomedicine field, there is a growing considerable demand for new antiviral agents and materials not only for the increasing worldwide problems caused by harmful viruses infections, but also for the serious side effects often showed by known antiviral agents [3]. We report here two different approaches for the conjugation of nucleoside antiviral agents to highly hydrophilic and dispersible MWCNTs which involves the covalent linkage of the antiviral agent by means of a cleavable linker or the complexation of the drug with a β-ciclodextrin (β-CD) covalently modified MWCNT nanohybrid (Fig. 1). The obtained compounds have been fully characterized by XPS, XRD, UV-Vis, SEM, TGA and TEM measurements and their biological activity against HIV and HSV was tested.