Cytotoxic activities of zinc oxide nanoparticles on non-invasive human breast and prostate cancer cell lines

ZnO-NPs have displayed anticancer activity against a broad range of tumor cells. The present research work was planned to formulate highly pure and well-characterized ZnO-NPs, in addition, to investigate their cytotoxicity against two types of cancer cells. The cancer cells that had been investigated in the present study were breast (MCF7) and prostate (PC3) cancer cells. The aqueous sol-gel method is a powerful and cost-effective technique for the synthesis of high pure ZnO-NPs. While the anticancer activities of ZnO-NPs on both MCF7 and PC3 were determined by MTT assay. Characterizations of ZnO-NPs were fundamentally evaluated by their morphological and structural properties, in addition to their particle size distribution with the aid of SEM and EDX, respectively. ZnO NPs were successfully prepared using sol-gel method in a range of nano-scale. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has shown flower-like nanoparticles of zinc oxide, their nano-size has ranged from 4.497 nm. to 143.7 nm. Results of EDX characterization has exhibited a good purity of ZnO-NPs (zinc content of 50% and Oxygen content of 50 %). There was size-dependent effectiveness of ZnO-NPs as an anticancer agent on both MCF7 and PC3. In addition, there were positive correlation between anticancer activities and low toxicity with the size of ZnO-NPs. At 12.2 μg/ml, ZnO-NPs has exhibited around 51% reduction in the viability of cancerous cells. In conclusion, the results of this study have shown that there was an effective and notable dose-dependent manner in the treatment of MCF7 and PC3 with ZnO-NPs, in the cell line approaches.