ORIGINAL PAPER A Density Functional Theory Study on the Interaction Between 5-Fluorouracil Drug and C 24 Fullerene Akram Hosseinian 1 • Esmail Vessally 2 • Saeideh Yahyaei 3 • Ladan Edjlali 4 • Ahmadreza Bekhradnia 5 Received: 1 February 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract Penetration of most of the polar drugs through the cell membrane is a challenging problem. It has been indicated that carbonaceous nanostructures can penetrate into biological cells. Here, we investigated the potential application of a C 24 fullerene as a carrier for anti-cancer 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) drug using density functional theory calculations. It was found that the 5-FU interaction with the pristine fullerene is very weak with adsorption energy of about -3.2 kcal/mol which is not suitable for drug delivery. To overcome this problem, one carbon atom is substituted by a boron atom which increases the adsorption energy to -27.2 kcal/mol. The B-doping makes the electronic properties of the fullerene sensitive to the drug. Finally, we proposed a drug release based on the low pH in the cancer cells. It was indicated that attacking protons to the interaction area between the drug and fullerene separates the drug from the carrier. Keywords Electronic structure Á Nanostructure Á Drug delivery Á DFT & Esmail Vessally vessallyesmail@gmail.com; vessally@yahoo.com & Ahmadreza Bekhradnia reza_bnia@yahoo.com; abekhradnia@mazums.ac.ir 1 Department of Engineering Science, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, P.O. Box 11365-4563, Tehran, Iran 2 Department of Chemistry, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran 3 Department of Chemistry, Miyaneh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Miyaneh, Iran 4 Department of Chemistry, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran 5 Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sari, Iran 123 J Clust Sci DOI 10.1007/s10876-017-1253-6