A novel anti‐cancer drug carrier, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) encapsulating drug‐loaded hollow silica nanoparticles, is used to carry a photosensitizer drug and deliver it to breast tumors, due to the natural high tumor affinity of the MSCs, and inhibit tumor growth by photo dynamic therapy. This new strategy for delivering a photo sensitizer to tumors by using tumor‐affinitive MSCs addresses the challenge of the accumulation of photosensitizer drugs in tumors in photodynamic therapy.
A photosensitizer, pyropheophorbid‐a (PPa), is conjugated to SKBR‐3 breast cancer cell‐specific biological nanowire phage, to form a novel PPa‐phage complex, which is further successfully used in selectively killing SKBR‐3 breast cancer cells by the mechanism of photodynamic therapy (PDT).
Antiangiogenesis is a promising approach to cancer therapy but is limited by the lack of tumor‐homing capability of the current antiangiogenic agents. Angiogenin, a protein overexpressed and secreted by tumors to trigger angiogenesis for their growth, has never been explored as an antiangiogenic target in cancer therapy. Here it is shown that filamentous fd phage, as a biomolecular biocompatible nanofiber, can be engineered to become capable of first homing to orthotopic breast tumors and then capturing angiogenin to prevent tumor angiogenesis, resulting in targeted cancer therapy without side effects. The phage is genetically engineered to display many copies of an identified angiogenin‐binding peptide on its side wall and multiple copies of a breast‐tumor‐homing peptide at its tip. Since the tumor‐homing peptide can be discovered and customized virtually toward any specific cancer by phage display, the angiogenin‐binding phages are thus universal “plug‐and‐play” tumor‐homing cancer therapeutics.
Although dendritic nanoparticles have been prepared by many different methods, control over their degree of branching (DB) is still impossible, preventing us from understanding the effect of the DB on the properties of the nanodendrites as cancer therapeutics. Herein, we developed a novel seed-mediated method to prepare gold nanodendrites (AuNDs) in an organic solvent using long chain amines as a structural directing agent. We discovered that the DB could be tuned facilely by simply adjusting synthetic parameters, such as the solvent type, the type and concentration of the long chain amines. We found that DB tuning resulted in dramatic tunability in the optical properties in the near infrared (NIR) range, which led to significantly different performance in the photothermal cancer therapy. Our in vitro and in vivo studies revealed that AuNDs with a higher DB were more efficient in photothermal tumor destruction under a lower wavelength NIR irradiation. In contrast, those with a lower DB performed better in tumor destruction under a higher wavelength NIR irradiation, indicating that AuNDs of even lower DB should have even better photothermal cancer therapy efficiency within the second NIR window. Thus, the tunable optical properties of AuNDs in the NIR range allow us to selectively determine a suitable laser wavelength for the best cancer therapeutic performance.
Precision medicine emphasizes patient-specific formulation for treatment of diseases, especially cancer. However, in targeted cancer treatment, because the expression level of tumor receptors in each patient varies even for the same type of cancer, the ligand/receptor-mediated approach does not seem promising for precision medicine. In this work, we demonstrated our strategy of using a phage display technique for breast cancer precision medicine. Using in vivo biopanning, we first selected an MCF-7 breast tumor-targeting peptide, then tested the effectiveness of the as-selected peptide in tumor homing and finally conjugated the peptide to a model photothermal drug, namely, gold nanorods, to achieve enhanced cancer killing efficacy. The peptides identified by the phage display technique can guide the drug to the tumors without the need to know the exact receptors on the tumor. This approach requires significantly less effort to explore patient-specific targeting molecules for precision medicine.
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