In vivo Toxicity Evaluation of a Nano-drug Delivery System Using a Caenorhabditis elegansModel System

Drug carrier materials need to possess good biological safety. Presently, most biosafety evaluation studies use rodent animal models, including rats and rabbits. However, the cost of raising these animals is relatively high and the experimental period is long. Caenorhabditis elegans(C. elegans) presents an ideal toxicological evaluation model due to its simple structure, easy cultivation, short life cycle, and evolutionary conservation. In this paper, we used C. elegans to test the biological safety of our pH-responsive carrier system(FFPFF self-assembling into a nanosphere structure, FFPFF Nps), which was designed for anti-tumor drug delivery. Our results showed that exposure to high doses of FFPFF Nps did not have a significant impact on the survival rate, growth, development, movement, and reproduction of C. elegans. The preliminary evaluation of the overall biological model of C. elegans shows that FFPFF Nps has good biological safety and warrants further study.