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Anticancer effect of realgar nanoparticles on mouse melanoma skin cancer in vivo via transdermal drug delivery

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Abstract

Realgar has been used successfully to treat diseases for thousands of years, but its poor water solubility and high toxicity hampered its further medical uses. Here, we first applied transdermal drug delivery system to deliver realgar nanoparticles to investigate its anticancer effect and toxicity in vivo. In this study, MTT assay and flow cytometry analysis demonstrated that realgar significantly suppressed the proliferation and induced apoptosis of B16 melanoma cells in a dose-dependent manner. Transdermal penetration studies in vitro showed realgar nanoparticles could be delivered efficiently through skin. Tests on tumor-bearing C57BL/6 mice displayed that realgar could decrease the tumor volume markedly via transdermal drug delivery compared with the intraperitoneal administration and the control. Hematoxylin–eosin and immunohistochemical staining revealed that it could inhibit angiogenesis. The monitoring of the hepatic injury, body weight, feeding behavior, motor activity, and skin irritation of each animal indicated little toxicity of realgar to mice. The results demonstrated that realgar nanoparticles can be dermally delivered to achieve high efficacy against menaloma in vivo with low toxicity.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by grants from the Chinese Ministry of Sciences 973 Program (2006CB933300, 2007CB935800), Natural Science Foundation of China (#30721002), Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-R-139), the Cultivation Fund of the Ministry of Education of China (NO706035), and a grant from the science and technology key project of Anhui Province (07010302183).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and School of Life Sciences, University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230027, People’s Republic of China

    Qi-Hong Zhao, Ying Zhang, Yun Liu, Hui-Li Wang, Yuan-Yuan Shen, Wen-Jun Yang & Long-Ping Wen

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  1. Qi-Hong Zhao
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  2. Ying Zhang
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Correspondence to Long-Ping Wen.

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Zhao, QH., Zhang, Y., Liu, Y. et al. Anticancer effect of realgar nanoparticles on mouse melanoma skin cancer in vivo via transdermal drug delivery. Med Oncol 27, 203–212 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-009-9192-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-009-9192-1

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