Goat red blood cells as precursor for iron oxide nanocrystal synthesis to develop nuclear targeted lung cancer therapy

•Molecular approach of synthesis of Fe2O3-NC using goat blood as a bio-precursor.•The method is simple, efficient and environment friendly.•Synthesized nanocrystals were characterized by UV–vis spectroscopy, XRD, SEM, TEM, DLS and EDS.•Nanocrystals exhibited potent cytotoxicity against A549 cancer cell.•Nuclear targeting with expression of caspase-3, caspase-7 and Bcl-2 in A549 cancer cells.

In this study, we synthesised iron oxide nanocrystals (Fe2O3-NC) from goat blood (bio-precursor) using red blood cells (RBC) lysis method (a molecular level approach) for the first time. The formation of Fe2O3-NC was achieved through a single-phase chemical reduction method. The size distribution of Fe2O3-NC falls between 20–30 nm for pellet and 100–200 nm for lysate and were found to be crystalline. Fe2O3-NC demonstrated significant cytotoxicity on A549. We report the direct visualization of interactions between Fe2O3-NC and the cancer cell nucleus. The active transport of Fe2O3-NC to the nucleus induces major changes to nuclear phenotype via nuclear envelope invaginations. We further examined the root cause for the involvement of Fe2O3-NC on the expression of caspase-3, caspase-7 and Bcl-2 in A549 cancer cells. This functional proteomic analysis clearly implies that the lung cancer cell proliferation is perfectly targeted by the biosynthesised Fe2O3-NC which could provide new insight for nuclear-targeted cancer therapy.

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