In the 21st century, nanotechnology has been emerging as a very
promising field, with numerous applications in distinct areas, such as
textiles, food agriculture, environment, electronics and in the
biomedical field. Among the different categories of nanomaterials,
zeolites are a very important class of inorganic materials that have
been used in a wide range of applications. In the current work, we used
zeolite NaY as host to incorporate silver ions and the antineoplastic
drug 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) for microbial infections and nonmelanoma
skin cancer treatment, respectively. Both situations present
a major threat to public health: microbial infections due to their
increasing resistance to antibiotics and cancer because of the difficulty
of an efficient treatment especially when the disease has progressed
considerably. So, since zeolites have a range of structural and physical
properties that make them suitable for therapeutic delivery systems,
they could be interesting candidates for this purpose. Our goal is to
create an efficient and biocompatible dual topical delivery system with
zeolites and, this way, combine the antimicrobial and the
antineoplastic activity in the same formulation.This work has been developed under the scope of the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000013 and the project BioTecNorte (operation
NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004), supported by the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the
Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER). This work has been funded by
FEDER funds, through the Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme (COMPETE), under Project POCI-01-0145-FEDER006958
and by National funds, through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), under the scope of the projects:
PTDC/AAGTEC/5269/2014, Centre of Chemistry (UID/QUI/00686/2013 and UID/QUI/0686/2016), CITAB´s UID/AGR/04033/2013
and ICVS/3B’s POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007038.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
