Drug Delivery with Carbon Nanotubes for In vivo Cancer Treatment

Abstract

Chemically functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) have shown promise in tumor-targeted accumulation in mice and exhibit biocompatibility, excretion, and little toxicity. Here, we show in vivo SWNT drug delivery for tumor suppression in mice. We conjugate paclitaxel (PTX), a widely used cancer chemotherapy drug, to branched polyethylene glycol chains on SWNTs via a cleavable ester bond to obtain a water-soluble SWNT-PTX conjugate. SWNT-PTX affords higher efficacy in suppressing tumor growth than clinical Taxol in a murine 4T1 breast cancer model, owing to prolonged blood circulation and 10-fold higher tumor PTX uptake by SWNT delivery likely through enhanced permeability and retention. Drug molecules carried into the reticuloendothelial system are released from SWNTs and excreted via biliary pathway without causing obvious toxic effects to normal organs. Thus, nanotube drug delivery is promising for high treatment efficacy and minimum side effects for future cancer therapy with low drug doses. [Cancer Res 2008;68(16):6652-60]

Advanced targeted therapies in cancer: Drug nanocarriers, the future of chemotherapy

“…There are no FDA approvals or clinical trials in process up to date using carbon nanotubes, although the encouraging preclinical results in vitro and in vivo in cancer treatment via passive targeting show that this structures are promising nanocarriers for cancer treatment [18,126,296,297,300,[307][308][309][310][311][312][313][314][315][316]. Active tumor targeting has been rarely reported in vivo [300,317,318], usually without drug loading [301,303,319].…”

Folate and iron difunctionalized multiwall carbon nanotubes as dual-targeted drug nanocarrier to cancer cells

“…Firstly 1 g raw MWCNT were treated in 120 mL concentrated HNO 3 and H 2 SO 4 (1:3, v/v) solution at 120°C in an oil bath for 30 min [34]. After dilution with water by 10-fold, the solution was filtered through a 0.45 lm filter.…”

“…Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), as molecule carriers, exhibit potential in biological systems due to their distinct properties in cell membrane penetration, and loading and release of molecular cargoes [1][2][3][4][5]. Moreover, it has been discovered that CNTs could be metabolized by neutrophil myeloperoxidase [6] and the functionalized CNTs (f-CNTs) have less cytoxicity [7].…”

Interaction of nucleic acids with carbon nanotubes and dendrimers

“…One of the potential solutions to overcome these problems is the compaction of siRNA by synthetic gene delivery systems (Mintzer and Simanek 2009). siRNA compaction can be accomplished by using a non-viral delivery carrier such as linear or branched cationic polymer (dendrimer) (Tsubouchi et al 2002;Duxbury et al 2003;Grayson et al 2006) and CNTs (Lu et al 2004;Liu et al 2007Liu et al , 2008Liu et al , 2009.…”