LAUSR

Abstract It is our objective to hybridize iron oxide nanoparticles with functional inorganic substrate to afford the potential conjugate nanoparticles for cytotoxicity studies. Magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (Fe3O4 NPs), tethered with amine functional groups on its surface has been chosen as template to condense with the inorganic heterocyclic Schiff’s base (SBCTP) as a pendant group to afford conjugate nanoparticles. SBCTP, a non-geminal heterobifunctional substrate is synthesized by the substitution of five arms of Schiff’s base and one unit of aromatic aldehyde on hexachlorocyclotriphosphazene (HCCP). Despite the above two substrates exhibiting inherent drug properties, their mutual complementary role with case of Fe3O4@SBCTP NPs is investigated upon simple condensation of Schiff’s base units of SBCTP substrate on the surface of Fe3O4 NPs. Synthesis and characterization of the originally designed conjugate nanoparticles, Fe3O4@SBCTP NPs tends to exhibit potential anti-cancer properties to treat cancerous cells. As such the prospective hybrid product, Fe3O4@SBCTP NPs and its precursors, Fe3O4 NPs and SBCTP have been investigated separately for the cytotoxic activity with normal and cancerous cells at five different concentrations, with/without addition of the drug in MTT assay. Structural characterization of the above samples was deduced by data collected from multinuclear NMR (1H, 13C and 31P), solid state NMR, ESI mass, HR MS, FT-IR, UV–vis, XRD, FESEM, HRTEM, EDX, TGA and VSM at ambient temperature.