Study of Optical Properties of 5-Fluorouracil-Conjugated Nanoparticles

With a view to creating specialized applications in biomedical physics, the utilization of nanoparticles (NPs) for anticancer therapies has now emerged as a high research priority. Over the past few decades, I-III-VI NPs have gained more interest than II-VI or IV-VI because these NPs are less toxic, cadmium-free and possess excellent optical properties. This paper reports the conjugation of the anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil (FU), which is a water-soluble drug, on glutathione (GSH)-capped copper indium sulfide core (CIS) NPs, which are formed using an aqueous synthesis method. Different concentrations of the drug, FU are taken into consideration for the conjugation with CIS NPs. This paper includes the study of change in the optical properties of CIS NPs after the drug FU is conjugated on them. The optical properties include Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and the UV–Visible (UV–Vis) spectroscopy. The PL spectroscopy of FU-conjugated CIS NPs shows that as the concentration of the drug is increased, there is quenching in the fluorescence intensity of the CIS NPs after the drug FU is conjugated with CIS NPs. The FTIR spectroscopy confirms the conjugation of the drug FU to CIS NPs and UV–Vis spectroscopy shows the absorbance of the drug on CIS NPs. The results strongly suggest the successful chemical conjugation of FU to CIS NPs and can be used in various biomedical applications in the future.