Intracellular Delivery of Fluorescently Labeled Polysaccharide Nanoparticles to Cultured Breast Cancer Cells.

Nanoparticle delivery is becoming an increasingly more valuable technique in cancer drug treatments. The use of fluorescent probes, in particular, can provide noninvasive strategies to interrogate the internalization mechanisms of cancer cells and aid in drug design. Here we describe the delivery of fluorescently labeled polysaccharide-based nanoparticles to breast cancer cells in vitro and their subsequent immunofluorescence microscopy examination. The description of the synthesis, preparation, and delivery of the nanoparticles can be widely applicable to other in vitro drug delivery studies.