Assessment of the Biocompatibility of Cucurbiturils in Blood Cells

• Main Authors: Alina Aktanova, Tatjana Abramova, Ekaterina Pashkina, Olga Boeva, Lyubov Grishina, Ekaterina Kovalenko, Vladimir Kozlov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Nanomaterials
• Subjects: nanoparticles; cucurbiturils; cytotoxicity; immunosafety; apoptosis; hemolysis
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/11/6/1356

Currently, cucurbiturils are being actively researched all over the world. Research is focused on the ways of improving the solubility and selectivity of cucurbiturils, increasing the stability of the complexes with other particles in various media and enhancing their ability to bind and release various substances. The most significant area of our research is the assessment of safety, studying the biological properties and synergistic effects of cucurbiturils during complexation with drugs. In this article, the hemocompatibility of erythrocytes and leukocytes with cucurbiturils was investigated. We demonstrated that cucurbiturils have no cytotoxic effect, even at high concentrations (1 mM) and do not affect the viability of PBMCs. However, cucurbiturils can increase the level of the early apoptosis of lymphocytes and cucurbit[7]uril enhances hemolysis in biologically relevant media. Despite this, cucurbiturils are fairly safe organic molecules in concentrations up to 0.3 mM. Thus, we believe that it will become possible to use polymer nanostructures as drug delivery systems in clinical practice, since cucurbiturils can be modified to improve pharmacological properties.