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Facile fabrication of glutathione-responsive and photothermal nanocarriers with dendritic mesoporous silica nanoparticles for the controlled drug delivery

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Abstract

The synergistic treatment combining chemotherapy and hyperthermy, as a promising strategy, can improve the therapeutic efficiency of tumor therapy. The glutathione-responsive, chemotherapeutic and photothermal synergistic drug delivery systems (DDS) were developed using degradable dendritic mesoporous silica nanoparticles (DDMSNs) as carriers, camptothecin (CPT) as antitumor drug, and bovine serum albumin (BSA)/CuS as photothermal reagents (denoted as DDMSNs-CPT-CuS). BSA/CuS can prevent the premature drug release during the delivery process, and convert light energy into heat under photothermal treatment. The DDMSNs-CPT-CuS composites ranging from 100 to 200 nm had a loading capacity of 150 μg mg−1 for CPT and performed excellent GSH-triggered drug release behavior under condition of pH (5.0) and glutathione (GSH, 10 mM). The photothermal conversion efficiency (η) of DDMSNs-CuS was 38.8% with 808 nm laser irradiation for 10 min (2.5 W cm−2). The engineered DDMSNs-CuS showed the low protein adsorption capacity (140–230 μg mg−1), hemolysis rate of 5% (200 μg mL−1), and weak cytotoxicity for A549 and Hela cells with a cell viability of more than 75% (50 μg mL−1), indicating that the developed drug carriers displayed superior biocompatibility. There were significant differences between the cell viabilities treated with DDMSNs-CPT-CuS under NIR laser irradiation and that of without NIR laser irradiation when the loaded-CPT concentration was more than 6 μg mL−1. The proposed DDMSNs-CPT-CuS exhibited well performances, such as easy preparation, low cytotoxicity and high photothermal conversion efficiency. The results illustrated that DDS can achieve the synergistic treatment of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy for tumor cells. Therefore, this work provides a promising strategy to design multi-responsive and synergistic treatment DDS, and the developed DDMSNs-CPT-CuS present great potential for tumor treatment.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Zhongjing Young Scholars Research Funding (B) of Henan University of Chinese Medicine, the Key Science and Technology Program of Henan Province (212102311049), National Natural Sciences Foundation for Young Scientists of China (No. 21505034), Scientific Research Nursery Project of Henan University of Chinese Medicine (MP2020-23, MP2020-107), and Henan College Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program of Henan University of Chinese Medicine (202110471007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Pharmacy, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, 450046, China

    Le Wu, Ruihong Lv, Haohao Wang, Shanshan Gao, Yuan Wang, Shanshan Zhang, Hongying Zhou & Yingli An

  2. Academy of Chinese Medicine Science, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, 450046, Henan, China

    Mingzhuo Cao

  3. Henan Engineering Technology Research Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine Health Industry, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, 450046, Henan, China

    Yongsheng Ji

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  1. Le Wu
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Correspondence to Yongsheng Ji.

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Wu, L., Lv, R., Wang, H. et al. Facile fabrication of glutathione-responsive and photothermal nanocarriers with dendritic mesoporous silica nanoparticles for the controlled drug delivery. J Nanopart Res 24, 128 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-022-05498-0

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