Dr. Wenndy Pantoja

University of Puerto Rico, US

Abstract Title: Andrographolide-Loaded Gold Carbon Quantum Dots and Their Doped Derivatives for Enhanced Hydrophilicity in a Drug Delivery System

Biography:

Wenndy Pantoja has completed her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Puerto Rico. Her work focuses on the biomedical applications of carbon-metal hybrid nanoparticles. She is deeply interested in applying nanoscience and materials chemistry to biomedicine, with the goal of developing innovative and sustainable treatments for complex diseases like cancer.

Research Interest:

Advancements in drug delivery technologies have paved the way for numerous pharmaceutical innovations aimed at enhancing patient health. These innovations focus on optimizing the delivery of therapeutics to their intended target sites, reducing off-target accumulation, and promoting patient adherence to treatment regimens. An appropriate drug delivery system can enhance various crucial pharmacological properties of the drug that may not be optimized when administered in its free form. Carbon-based quantum dots (CBQDs) are defined as small carbon nanoparticles that not only possess the good physicochemical properties of metallic quantum dots, excellent stability, and tunable fluorescence, but also benefit from easy synthesis, excellent biocompatibility, and non-toxicity. Decorating CBQDs with metal atoms can modify their optical, chemical, and electronic properties, allowing these materials to be used in a variety of applications. In this sense, the use of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) is a good candidate to decorate the CBQDs. AuNPs have optical and electronic properties such as conductivity, localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), stability towards oxidation, and biocompatibility. The present work reports a method for the synthesis of gold nanocomposites using carbon quantum dots (CBQDs) and doped-carbon quantum dots (D-CBQDs) as a reducing agent, diverging from the conventional methods typically employed. Based on the properties of the nanocomposites built with AuNPs, the drug Andrographolide (ADG) was coupled into the system. The nanocomposites were characterized by FTIR, UV-Vis, XRD, TEM/SEM, and NMR spectroscopy. Consequently, these nanosystems could enhance the transport and delivery of ADG in aqueous media, potentially leading to more effective therapeutic applications of ADG.