Emerging Strategies in Anticancer Combination Therapy Employing Silica‐Based Nanosystems

Abstract

Combination therapy has emerged as one of the most promising approaches for cancer treatment. However, beyond remotely‐triggered therapies that require advanced infrastructures and optimization, new combination therapies based on internally triggered cell‐killing effects have also demonstrated promising therapeutic profiles. In this revision, the focus is on self‐triggered strategies able to improve the therapeutic effect of drug delivery nanosystems. As reviewed, ferroptosis, hypoxia, and immunotherapy show potency enough to treat satisfactorily tumors in vivo. However, the interest of combining those with chemotherapeutics, especially with carriers based on mesoporous silica, has provided a new generation of therapeutic nanomedicines with potential enough to achieve complete tumor remission in murine models.

Mesoporous Silica Materials as an Emerging Tool for Cancer Immunotherapy

“…These unique chemical features are also a potential advantage for combining synergistic therapies because MSN can hold different biomolecules and other NPs. [ 76 , 77 ] Besides, and especially for immunotherapeutic approaches, MSN can act as adjuvants to promote immune cell recruitment and activation. [ 78 , 79 ] Bearing all this in mind, numerous silica‐based immunotherapies have been developed in only a few years and an increasing number of examples is expected to be published in the near future.…”

Recent Advances Toward the Use of Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for the Treatment of Bacterial Infections

“…The effect of this dual-action nanosystem permitted us to achieve a complete destruction of the E. coli biofilm even at minimal concentrations (10 μg MSNs per mL), improving any of the precedent models and showing that combination therapy usually improves treatments with single-drug delivery systems. 17 , 18 …”

“…One of the last metals to arrive for antibacterial treatment is iron, either in a colloidal form 95 , 96 or as doping element. The antibacterial possibilities of iron are huge as they can perform such effects by either thermal destruction of bacteria, 97 production of toxic reactive oxygen species (ROS) throughout Fenton-like reactions 17 , 92 or upon a membrane depolarization only in the case of iron oxide particles (IONs). 98 Despite the number of IONs@MSN nanosystems reported with promising applications on anticancer therapy, we did not find any silica-containing nanodevice applied against bacterial infection.…”

“…Combination therapy has become a powerful tool for nanomedicine, as it allows us to exert several effects with a single device, as reviewed by us focused on cancer therapy; 17 , 18 and similarly, bacterial infections could be treated with more than one biocidal. Among all the possibilities we will focus on the main strategies developed so far in order to shed some light onto a very complex field of research ( Table 4 ).…”

“…They are one of the few materials that can easily combine in single entities an efficient drug-delivery profile, 10–14 as reported by our group two decades ago, 15 , 16 together with a facile (bio)chemical modification. These two complementary aspects permit us to create fancy multicomponent nanodevices able to exert combination therapy 17 , 18 onto cells; as already covered by us in several bibliographic revisions on cancer 17–19 and infection. 7 , 8 , 12 In addition to this synthetic modularity it is also important to remark on the advances made on increasing batchreproducibility and scale-up, which will allow us to overcome laboratory-scale bottlenecks and address semi-industrial synthesis 20 and thus face the commercialization of antibiotic nanodevices.…”