ABSTRACT
Breast cancer has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer type in the world. A combination of chemotherapy and photothermal therapy (PTT) has emerged as a promising strategy for breast cancer therapy. However, the intricacy of precise delivery and the ability to initiate drug release in specific tumor sites remains a challenging puzzle. Therefore, to ensure that the therapeutic agents are synchronously delivered to the tumor site for their synergistic effect, a multifunctional nanoparticle system (PCRHNs) is developed, which is grafted onto the prussian blue nanoparticles (PB NPs) by reduction-responsive camptothecin (CPT) prodrug copolymer, and then modified with tumor-targeting peptide cyclo(Asp-d-Phe-Lys-Arg-Gly) (cRGD) and hyaluronic acid (HA). PCRHNs exhibited nano-sized structure with good monodispersity, high load efficiency of CPT, triggered CPT release in response to reduction environment, and excellent photothermal conversion under laser irradiation. Furthermore, PCRHNs can act as a photoacoustic imaging contrast agent-guided PTT. In vivo studies indicate that PCRHNs exhibited excellent biocompatibility, prolonged blood circulation, enhanced tumor accumulation, allow tumor-specific chemo-photothermal therapy to achieve synergistic antitumor effects with reduced systemic toxicity. Moreover, hyperthermia-induced upregulation of heat shock protein 70 in the tumor cells could be inhibited by CPT. Collectively, PCRHNs may be a promising therapeutic way for breast cancer therapy.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: To study the effects of iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) and prussian blue nanoparticles (PBNPs) on the stemness of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) cell lines, which may provide experimental basis and reference significance for the application of nanoparticles in the treatment of EOC. METHODS: SKOV3 and HO8910 cell lines were treated with IONPs and PBNPs respectively, then the drug-resistant genes in mRNA and protein levels were detected by RT-PCR and Western blot. The change of cell proliferation ability were detected by cell proliferation and clone formation experiments, and the expression of surface stemness-related molecules were detected by flow cytometer. RESULTS: The expression of ABCG2 and ALDH1A1 were both down regulated in SKOV3 and HO8910 cell lines treated with IONPs and PBNPs, respectively, while IONPs decreased the CD44+CD117+ subpopulation, and PBNPs increased the CD44+CD117+ subpopulation. Compared with the control cells, the proliferation of SKOV3 cells treated with IONPs and PBNPs were significantly reduced, however, there were no effects on HO8910 cell's proliferation after the cells treated with PBNPs. CONCLUSION: Drug-resistance genes and stem cell subpopulation of EOC SKOV3/HO8910 cell lines treated with IONPs were markedly reduced. However, PBNPs can improve the stem cell subpopulation and promote the cancer stem cell's characteristic of EOC cells but the drug-resistance genes were decreased.
ABSTRACT
An enzyme cascade strategy was introduced for sensitive detection of acid phosphatase ( ACP) . Pyrophosphate ions ( PPi ) can strongly bound Fe3+and thus hinders the production of Prussian blue nanoparticles (PBNPs). ACP can hydrolyze PPi to form phosphate ions, and the released Fe3+reacts with potassium ferrocyanide ( K4[ Fe ( CN )6] ) to form PBNPs. The formed PBNPs have high peroxidase-like activity, which can decompose hydrogen peroxide ( H2O2) to produce hydroxyl radical (·OH) for oxidizing the typical substrate of 3,3′,5,5′-tetramethylbenzidine ( TMB). Therefore, a novel sensing strategy for detecting ACP based on the high signal amplification of enzyme cascade was constructed. The results showed that there was a good linear relationship between the absorbance of oxidized TMB ( oxTMB ) and the concentration of ACP in the range of 3-20 U/L, with a detection limit of 0. 8 U/L. Different from the conventional enzyme cascades in which the product of one enzyme is the substrate of the other, this study opens up a new way to construct novel enzyme cascade system.