iBB

Cutaneous melanoma is the deadliest type of skin cancer and current treatment is still inadequate, with low patient survival rates. The use of polyphenols loaded into nanoparticles could potentially address the lack of efficacy of current therapy. In a collaborative work published in a special issue of the journal Materials, with researchers from the University of Porto, Pedro Fonte and Ana Macedo from BERG-iBB assessed the potential of xanthohumol-loaded nanoparticles to treat melanoma. Nanoparticles had a size of about 300 nm and a PdI of 0.259, while achieving a xanthohumol loading of about 90%. The viability study showed similar cytoxicity between the xanthohumol and xanthohumol-loaded nanoparticles at 48 h with the IC50 established at 10 µM.  The ultimate anti-melanoma effect emerged from an association between the viability, migration and macrophagic phenotype modulation. These results display the remarkable antitumour effect of the xanthohumol-loaded nanoparticles and are the first advance towards the application of a nanoformulation to deliver xanthohumol to reduce adverse effects by currently employed chemotherapeutics.