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Mesoporous Carbon Nanoparticles as Multi-functional Carriers for Cancer Therapy Compared with Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles

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Abstract

Mesoporous carriers have been widely used to deliver anticancer drugs due to their unique characteristics. In this work, mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN) and mesoporous carbon nanoparticles (MCN) with substantially similar and uniform particle size, specific surface area, and pore size were prepared to compare the photothermal effect, drug loading efficiencies (LE), and drug release properties. In order to improve the dispersion stability and biocompatibility of the carriers, MSN and MCN were grafted with PEG, respectively. The NIR-induced photothermal effect results indicated that MCN had a brilliant photothermal conversion efficiency due to its strong near-infrared absorption capacity, while MSN had no photothermal conversion capability. Moreover, LE of DOX in DOX/MCN-PEG reached 36.58%, higher than that in DOX/MSN-PEG, which was ascribed to non-covalent interaction of π-π stacking and electrostatic attraction. In addition, compared to DOX/MSN-PEG, DOX/MCN-PEG had a significantly increased release rate under NIR laser irradiation due to excellent photothermal conversion capability of MCN-PEG. Furthermore, cell viability assay and cellular uptake experiment results demonstrated that DOX/MCN-PEG showed a synergistic therapeutic effect in the combination of chemotherapy and phototherapy, with a combination index (CI) of 0.238.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81603058 and 81401501) and Youth Project of Liaoning Provincial Education Department (No. 2017LQN20).

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  1. Meiting Zhou and Qinfu Zhao contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Inorganic Chemistry, School of Pharmaceutical Engineering, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, 103 Wenhua Road, Shenyang, 110016, Liaoning Province, People’s Republic of China

    Meiting Zhou & Ying Zhang

  2. Department of Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, 103 Wenhua Road, Shenyang, 110016, Liaoning Province, People’s Republic of China

    Qinfu Zhao, Yifan Wu, Shuang Feng, Da Wang & Siling Wang

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  1. Meiting Zhou
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Correspondence to Ying Zhang or Siling Wang.

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Zhou, M., Zhao, Q., Wu, Y. et al. Mesoporous Carbon Nanoparticles as Multi-functional Carriers for Cancer Therapy Compared with Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles. AAPS PharmSciTech 21, 42 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1208/s12249-019-1604-8

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