Green Synthesis of Nanomaterials: Cytotoxicity and Drug Delivery

Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, the increasing requirement for green chemistry and nanotechnology led to the adoption of green synthetic routes for the synthesis of nanomaterials using plants, microorganisms, and others. Hence, the green synthesis of nanomaterials has been considered by researchers through an eco-friendly path, which has led to much research in recent years on the synthesis of nanomaterials using plants as a non-toxic, cost-effective, accessible, easy, and environmentally friendly synthetic pathway. Synthesized nanomaterials through green chemistry are non-toxic and can be a good choice for medical applications such as drug delivery, imaging, biotechnology, and biomedical. In the case of drug delivery, these nanomaterials can be a launching pad for the treatment of many diseases such as cancer. The synthesis of nanomaterials will be done with widely synthetic routes including physical, chemical, and biosynthetic routes which are very usual. Commonly, the used chemical methods are too expensive and employ hazardous and toxic chemicals which impose various risks to the environment. The biosynthetic route is a safe, biocompatible, environment-friendly green approach to synthesize nanomaterials using plants and microorganisms for biomedical applications. This synthesis can be carried out with fungi, algae, bacteria, and plants, etc. Some parts of plants such as leaves, fruits, roots, stems, seeds have been used for the synthesis of various nanomaterials. According to the unique characters of green-synthesized nanomaterials, they can be a very suitable choice for medical applications such as drug delivery, imaging, MRI, and etc. with the purpose of treating a variety of diseases.