tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is considered as one of the most fatal infectious diseases nowadays. Several traditional anti-tuberculosis drugs like isoniazid have been largely applied; however, they are associated with toxicity and poor anti-TB treatment. So, the fabrication of new alternative anti-TB drugs containing natural biopolymers for TB treatment has attracted great attention in recent years because of their remarkable features: biodegradability, biocompatibility and non-toxicity. Therefore, their medicine is very effective with low side effects compared with synthetic drugs. Our current work intends to engineer chitosan biguanidine (ChBG) nanoparticles as a new safe and high-efficient anti-TB drug using one-pot, green, cost-effective ionic gelation method. The chemical structure of as-formed materials was chemically confirmed using various analysis techniques: H-NMR, FTIR, SEM, and TEM. TEM results have proved the formation of uniformly well-distributed ChBG nanoparticles with a small particle size of ~38 nm. The inhibitory activity of these prepared nanoparticles was investigated against the growth of three different M. tuberculosis pathogens such as sensitive, MDR, and XDR, and in a comparison with the isoniazid drug as a standard anti-tuberculosis drug. The antituberculosis assay results showed that ChBG NPs attained MIC values of 0.48, 3.9, 7.81 μg/mL for inhibiting the growth of sensitive, MDR, and XDR M. tuberculosis pathogens compared to bare Ch NPs (15.63, 62.5 > 125 μg/mL) and the isoniazid drug (0.24, 0, 0 μg/mL), respectively. Moreover, cytotoxicity of the ChBG NPs was examined against normal lung cell lines (Wi38) and was found to have cell viability of 100 % with the concentration range of 0.48-7.81 μg/mL.