Hydrophobic drug delivery platform with polymer gatekeepers in mesoporous silica nanostructures

Abstract

Among small therapeutic molecules which have been developed as an anticancer agent, many of potential active molecules are critics for obstacle and challenge in the administration due to their poor solubility in aqueous solution. Solubilizing these drugs and delivering to a target cancer site have been extensively explored with nanoscale carriers, including micelles, hollow capsules, crosslinked nanogels, cylindrical micelles, and inorganic nanoparticles. However, the versatile drug delivery platform with noncovalent gatekeepers in many kinds of hydrophobic drug molecules without premature drug release, large loading capacity and colloidal stability is still challenging. Hence we developed a simple technique by utilizing the advantage of hardcore mesoporous silica, using the biocompatible non-covalent polymergatekeepers technique. This is a versatile drug delivery platform, where different kind of hydrophobic drugs such as doxorubicin, camptothecin, paclitaxel, curcumin and tomaxifen can be loaded into the core at high capacity, without any chemical modification of the carrier. The polymer shell surface can be easily decorated with different targeting ligands with simple and mild thiol-disulfide chemistry. The drug molecules loaded in the nanocontainers can be released by the degradation of the polymer shell in controlled manner in the intracellular reducing microenvironment, which consequentially induces cell death.