The antioxidant and anticancer potential of Ricinus communis L. essential oil nanoemulsions

In the current study, we planned to produce a novel nanoemulsion based drug delivery system containing RCEO (RCEO-NE) in order to immunize its pharmaceutical properties and investigate its antioxidant and anticancer potentials. For this purpose, the Ultrasonication method was used to produce RCEO-NE. Then, we characterized and evaluated RCEO-NE properties, antioxidant and anticancer activities, respectively. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS) methods were applied to characterize the particles. Finally, we designed a dose-dependent treatment plane for 48 h incubation to evaluate the RCEO-NE anticancer impacts on HepG2 cells compared with the normal L929 cell line. We measured the cytotoxic activity, Cas-3 gene expression, and cell cycle status in HepG2 cells as the anticancer indicators. The obtained results demonstrated that the 81.4 nm droplets of RCEO-NE with polydispersity index 0.41 revealed appreciable antioxidant activities and can significantly reduce the HepG2 cells' viability (p < 0.001). The increasing treatment doses of RCEO-NE up-regulates the expression of Cas-3 and increases the SubG1 peaks in treated HepG2 cells. Also, they showed a cell-specific cytotoxic effect among the cancer HepG2 and normal L929 cells (p < 0.001). Our novel RCEO-NE system due to its cell-specific high performance antioxidant, cytotoxic and individual apoptotic activities for HepG2 cancer cells has the potential to be used biopreservative in food industries and applied as an efficient cancer therapy strategy.