Dihydroartemisinin-loaded Magnetic Nanoparticles for Enhanced Chemodynamic Therapy

Abstract

13Recently, chemodynamic therapy (CDT) has represented a new approach for cancer treatment with 14 low toxicity and side effects. Nonetheless, it has been a challenge to improve the therapeutic effect 15 through increasing the amount of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Herein, we increased the amount of 16ROS agents in the Fenton-like reaction by loading dihydroartemisinin (DHA) which was an artemisinin 17 (ART) derivative containing peroxide groups, into magnetic nanoparticles (MNP), thereby improving 18 the therapeutic effect of CDT. Blank MNP were almost non-cytotoxic, whereas three MNP loading 19ART-based drugs, MNP-ART, MNP-DHA, and MNP-artesunate (MNP-AS), all showed significant 20 killing effect on breast cancer cells (MCF-7 cells), in which MNP-DHA were the most potent. What's 21 more, the MNP-DHA showed high toxicity to drug-resistant breast cancer cells (MCF-7/ADR cells), 22demonstrating its ability to overcome multidrug resistance (MDR). The study revealed that MNP could 23 produce ferrous ions under the acidic condition of tumor microenvironment, which catalyzed DHA to 24 produce large amounts of ROS, leading to cell death. Further experiments also showed that the MNP-25DHA had significant inhibitory effect on another two aggressive breast cancer cell lines (MDA-MB-26 231 and MDA-MB-453 cells), which indicated that the great potential of MNP-DHA for the treatment 27 of intractable breast cancers. 28 346We thank Yongbin Cao, Ruihong Xie, Xuechun Zhang and Jingbo Lin at Fudan for helpful discussions. 347 8 Conflict of Interest Statement 348The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial 349relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. 350 9

Recent Progresses in Cancer Nanotherapeutics Design Using Artemisinins as Free Radical Precursors

“…The cases above have revealed that targeting to the acidic endo/lysosome is a promising way to achieve Fe 2+ /Fe 3+ release from iron oxide nanoparticles. By following these studies, several ARTs nanosystems have been reported most recently (Wang D. et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2017;Pan et al, 2018;Guo et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019;Qin et al, 2019). Generally, nanoparticles are easy to be chemically modified with additional ligands to strengthen the functionalities.…”