Development of <scp>CaO</scp>/Chitosan/Dopamine Nanoparticles—Antibacterial, Anticancer, and Antioxidant Activities

ABSTRACT Infectious diseases and cancer are two significant groups of diseases attributed to the major death around the globe. There is a need to develop innovative strategies to treat antibiotic resistance bacteria and cancer effectively. In this context, the present work focused on development of calcium oxide (CaO) and CaO modified with chitosan and dopamine nanocomposites (CaO–Cs–Dop) as potential antibacterial, anticancer, and antioxidant agents. The prepared nanoparticles were characterized using various characterization techniques. FTIR revealed the functional groups of prepared samples indicating the successful preparation of nanoparticles. XRD revealed the fcc cubic nature of CaO nanoparticles and the crystallite size was found to be 23 nm for CaO–Cs–DOP and 31 nm for CaO nanoparticles. DLS results confirmed the mean particle hydrodynamic size was found as nm for 231.90 CaO and 189.90 nm for CaO–Cs–DOP nanocomposite. The disk diffusion assay was carried out against common pathogenic bacterial strains as Pseudomonas aeruginosa , Klebsiella pneumoniae , Vibrio cholerae , Escherichia coli , and Shigella dysenteriae . MTT assay was carried out to determine the anticancer activity against MOLT‐4 cell line, a human acute lymphoblastic leukemia model. The results indicated that CaO–Cs–DOP nanocomposites exhibited enhanced antibacterial and anticancer activities compared with bare CaO nanoparticles, making them a promising multifunctional agent in biomedical applications.