pH/NIR Light-Controlled Multidrug Release via a Mussel-Inspired Nanocomposite Hydrogel for Chemo-Photothermal Cancer Therapy

Abstract

This study reports on an intelligent composite hydrogel with both pH-dependent drug release in a cancer environment and heat generation based on NIR laser exposure, for the combined application of photothermal therapy (PTT) and multidrug chemotherapy. For the first time in the literature, Dopamine nanoparticle (DP) was incorporated as a highly effective photothermal agent as well as anticancer drug, bortezomib (BTZ) carrier inside a stimuli responsive pNIPAAm-co-pAAm hydrogel. When light is applied to the composite hydrogel, DP nanoparticle absorbs the light, which is dissipated locally as heat to impact cancer cells via hyperthermia. On the other hand, facile release of the anticancer drug BTZ from the surface of DP encapsulated hydrogel could be achieved due to the dissociation between catechol groups of DP and the boronic acid functionality of BTZ in typical acidic cancer environment. In order to increase the synergistic effect by dual drug delivery, Doxorubicin (DOXO) were also loaded to pNIPAAm-co-pAAm/DP-BTZ hydrogel and the effect of monotherapy as well as combined therapy were detailed by a complete characterization. Our results suggest that these mussel inspired nanocomposite with excellent heating property and controllable multidrug release can be considered as a potential material for cancer therapy.

Physical Organohydrogels With Extreme Strength and Temperature Tolerance

“…Therefore, improving mechanical properties of hydrogels became an important research hotspot. So far, versatile strategies to achieve tough hydrogels have been emerged, including double-network hydrogels (Gong et al, 2003;Gong, 2014;Liang et al, 2016;Chen et al, 2018;Jing et al, 2019), nanocomposite hydrogels (Haraguchi and Takehisa, 2002;Chen et al, 2015;GhavamiNejad et al, 2016;Zhu et al, 2017), topological hydrogels (Okumura and Ito, 2001;Li et al, 2018), macromolecular microsphere composite hydrogels (Huang et al, 2007;Gu et al, 2016;Zhang and Khademhosseini, 2017;Wang Z. et al, 2018), hydrophobic association hydrogels (Li et al, 2012;Mihajlovic et al, 2017;Han et al, 2018), hydrogen bonding/dipole-dipole reinforced hydrogels (Han et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2015;Qin et al, 2018), and many others (Gong et al, 2016;Liu J. et al, 2017;Zhao et al, 2019). However, almost all of the hydrogels swollen a large amount of water in polymer networks cannot resist a cold or hot environment (Wei et al, 2014(Wei et al, , 2015Wang W. et al, 2018), hindering the application of tough hydrogels in harsh conditions.…”

Current Advances of Hollow Capsules as Controlled Drug Delivery Systems

“…Despite of the feasibility of incorporating of light photoisomeric groups to form UV responsive materials, the application of UV as a trigger source in a medical context is not appropriate due to its potential damage to healthy tissues and its limited tissue penetration. To solve this issue, near‐infrared (NIR) responsive materials have been considered as an alternative for those triggered by UV light as NIR has deeper penetration depth compared to UV and it is benign to healthy cells …”

Hydrogel-based phototherapy for fighting cancer and bacterial infection

“…GhavamiNejad et al [66] reported an intelligent composite hydrogel with both pH-dependent drug release in a cancer environment and heat generation based on NIR laser exposure, for the combined application of PTT and multidrug chemotherapy (Fig. 5).…”