Rational Design of Polymeric Nanoparticles with Tailorable Biomedical Functions for Cancer Therapy

Abstract

Polymeric nanoparticles (NPs) play a key role in nanoscale formulations for bioimaging, cancer treatment, and theranostics. In this work, we designed and synthesized a series of hydrophobic polymers (P1-6) with different pendent groups via one-step multicomponent Passerini reaction. These polymers possessed similar molecular structures and various biomedical functions. Interestingly, they could self-assemble into stable NPs in aqueous media. All formed NPs were redox sensitive because of the existence of disulfide bonds in the backbone. The stability of NPs in aqueous media with or without glutathione was systematically evaluated and compared. The optical performance, including fluorescence resonance energy transfer, was characterized under different conditions for those polymers with fluorescent components. Importantly, all formed NPs showed good cytocompatibility toward HeLa cells and different biological functions, including drug loading and delivery, bioimaging with variable fluorescence, and photodynamic activity, as evidenced by experiments in vitro and in vivo. These results demonstrate the great potential of multicomponent reaction to customize versatile polymeric nanoparticles for biomedical applications.

A pseudohomogeneous nanocarrier based on carbon quantum dots decorated with arginine as an efficient gene delivery vehicle

“…Presence of different functional groups on the surface with high density, special architecture and two-dimensional graphene network lead to endow excellent tendency of pseudohomogeneous carrier to bind with DNA. Besides, the DNA fragmentation does not occur due to no extra bonds of DNA are detected in gel electrophoresis proving that the proposed biocompatible nanocarrier meets the standards required to enter a clinical trials 5 , 6 , 39 , 42 , 43 .…”

Editorial: Isocyanide-Based Multicomponent Reactions

“…Besides green chemistry attributes and mechanistic beauty, a key feature of multicomponent reactions that has not yet been fully embraced is the easy engineering of functional materials (Afshari and Shaabani, 2018). Functions can range from affinity ligands for immunoglobulin purification (Kruljec and Bratkovič, 2017) to imaging compounds in biological systems (Lin et al, 2017) to proteome-wide mapping of protein-protein interactions (Kambe et al, 2014) to molecular machines (García-González et al, 2018) to molecular keys for applications in advanced encryption standard cryptography with molecular steganography (Boukis et al, 2018). According to the basic principle form follows function, forms can be assembled in a unique fashion via multicomponent reactions from building blocks connected to certain properties.…”

Optically Active Nanomaterials for Bioimaging and Targeted Therapy

“…Polymer nanoparticles (PNPs) have been widely developed for cancer diagnosis and therapy due to their high extinction coefficients, extraordinary fluorescence intensity, good photostability, biocompatibility and biodegradability, and simple encapsulation of anticancer drugs and/or imaging probes (Pecher and Mecking, 2010; Yang et al, 2012; Feng et al, 2017). Although PNPs can accumulate in the tumor region via the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect (Luk and Zhang, 2014; Tang et al, 2016), cancer-targeting moieties (e.g., proteins, peptides, and aptamers) must be modified onto the NP surface by chemical or physical interaction, resulting in functionalized PNPs with enhanced selectivity and sensitivity for cancer diagnosis and therapy (Liu et al, 2015c; Li et al, 2016; Li and Yang, 2017; Lin et al, 2017). Recently, functionalized PNPs have been designed according to specific cellular processes and disease environments and applied to selectively deliver drugs to the target regions (Vaidya et al, 2011; Krasia-Christoforou and Georgiou, 2013; Herranz-Blanco et al, 2016; Kumar et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2019).…”