Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is one of the most deadly cancers. The average life span for all patients is 12-18 months after diagnosis and treatment. The main treatments to combat glioblastoma are: surgery and radiation therapy. Surgery, mainly used to remove most of the tumor mass, has had limitations due to the invasive characteristic that precedes GBM. Radiotherapy (RT) has taken on a crucial role in GBM therapies, its objective being to stop cell proliferation by causing breaks in the DNA chain of cancer cells. However, GBM cells have a radioresistant character, limiting the effectiveness of this therapy. Carbon dots (PC) are spherical nanostructures, with high biocompatibility, optical and physicochemical properties that make them interesting for targeted applications by increasing the effectiveness of radiotherapy. In these applications, one of the most important parameters to establish in the PC is its level of cytotoxicity. Therefore, the objective of this work was to identify the cytotoxic effect that citric acid-based carbon spots have against glioblastoma cancer cells (U87) and breast cancer cells (MCF-7) by means of two viability assays. MTT and Azul Tripán. As a result, carbon points were obtained by means of microwave reaction (bottom up) from citric acid, ethanol and N, N-dimethylformamide, emitting a blue fluorescence under irradiation with 365 nm ultraviolet light. High viability of U87 and MCF-7 cells was seen against the synthesized PCs. This suggests that their low cytotoxicity evidenced in this work, their ease of modulating surface properties, and their biocompatibility make PCs potentially investigated for future work.
