Cytotoxicity of 2-oxazines and poly(2-oxazine)s in mouse fibroblast

Poly(2-oxazoline)s are a polymer family that has received much attention in the last decade as biomaterials. In contrast, poly(2-oxazine)s, which can be viewed as their higher backbone homologue, have received much less attention. A first step towards the assessment as potential biomaterials is the evaluation of the cytotoxicity of the polymers. Therefore, a small selection of water soluble poly(2-oxazine)s are evaluated with respect to their cytotoxicity against 3T3 mouse fibroblasts. The polymers were tested at concentrations of up to 100 g/L for 24h. In addition, we studied the cytotoxicity of the monomers, namely 2-methyl-2-oxazine, 2-ethyl-2-oxazine and 2-propyl-2-oxazine in the same cell line. We found that neither monomers nor polymers exhibit a pronounced cytotoxicity. None of the monomers lead to any discernable effect on the cell viability in concentrations of up to 1 g/L with IC50 values ranging from 4 g/L to 20 g/L. Not surprisingly, the polymers poly(2-methyl-2-oxazine) and poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazine) exhibit even lower cytotoxicity with IC50 values ranging from 20 to 70 g/L. These preliminary but positive evaluation of the cytotoxicity of poly(2-methyl-2-oxazine) and poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazine) warrants further investigations on their use as biomaterials.