3.4 Antitumoral effect
The antitumoral effect of nanoreactors was assayed in 4T1 breast tumor cells, a breast cancer cell line derived from the mammary gland tissue of a mouse. In addition, the cytotoxic effect of nanoreactors was also assayed on cultures of 293T healthy cell line from the human embryonic kidney. Cytotoxicity was directly estimated as the cell viability as a metabolic activity using the MTT colorimetric assay.
Control experiments were carried out with VLP deprovided of GOx (Fig. 4). Interestingly, high concentrations of empty VLPs and VLPs@HSA (>25 µg/mL) significantly reduced the cell viability of 4T1 cancer cells. In contrast, VLPs treatment of 293T epithelial cells did not reduce cell viability at the highest concentration tested of 100 µg/mL, except for unfunctionalized VLPs.