Review on metal nanoparticles as nanocarriers: current challenges and perspectives in drug delivery systems.

Over the past few years, nanotechnology has been attracting considerable research attention because of their outstanding mechanical, electromagnetic and optical properties. Nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary field comprising nanomaterials, nanoelectronics, and nanobiotechnology, as three areas which extensively overlap. The application of metal nanoparticles (MNPs) has drawn much attention offering significant advances, especially in the field of medicine by increasing the therapeutic index of drugs through site specificity preventing multidrug resistance and delivering therapeutic agents efficiently. Apart from drug delivery, some other applications of MNPs in medicine are also well known such as in vivo and in vitro diagnostics and production of enhanced biocompatible materials and nutraceuticals. The use of metallic nanoparticles for drug delivery systems has significant advantages, such as increased stability and half-life of drug carrier in circulation, required biodistribution, and passive or active targeting into the required target site. Green synthesis of MNPs is an emerging area in the field of bionanotechnology and provides economic and environmental benefits as an alternative to chemical and physical methods. Therefore, this review aims to provide up-to-date insights on the current challenges and perspectives of MNPs in drug delivery systems. The present review was mainly focused on the greener methods of metallic nanocarrier preparations and its surface modifications, applications of different MNPs like silver, gold, platinum, palladium, copper, zinc oxide, metal sulfide and nanometal organic frameworks in drug delivery systems.

Biocatalytic one pot three component approach: Facile synthesis, characterization, molecular modelling and hypoglycemic studies of new thiazolidinedione festooned quinoline analogues catalyzed by alkaline protease from Aspergillus niger.

A novel ANAP (Aspergillus niger from alkaline protease) catalyzed one pot three component approach in the synthesis of new thiazolidinedione festooned quinoline analogues via Knoevenagel condensation and N-alkylation have been reported. The catalytic effect of enzyme was monitored and optimized by adjusting various parameters including catalyst concentration, choice of solvent and temperature. The isolated alkaline protease exhibits favorable features for the reaction response such as the shorter reaction time, simple work-up procedure, clean reaction profiles and excellent product yields through reusability of the catalyst upto five cycles. In silico molecular docking simulations were carried out to find out the effective binding affinity of the synthesized quinoline analogues 4(a-i) towards PPARγ protein (Id-2XKW). In vitro α-amylase and α-glucosidase assays were performed for hypoglycemic activity evaluation. In vivo hypoglycemic studies carried out on streptozotocin (SZT) induced diabetic male albino rats have shown that compounds 4e and 4f significantly reduced blood glucose levels with percentage reduction of 43.7 ± 0.91 and 45.6 ± 0.28 at a concentration of 50 mg/kg body wt. The results obtained from molecular docking simulations and in vitro enzyme assays are in consistent with in-vivo studies which clearly demonstrated that out of the synthesized quinoline analogues, compounds 4e and 4f possess promising hypoglycemic activity which was on par to that of standards pioglitazone and rosiglitazone respectively.