Silicon-Nanowire-Based Nanocarriers with Ultrahigh Drug-Loading Capacity for In Vitro and In Vivo Cancer Therapy

摘要

With rapid advances of nano-biotechnology, the use of nanomaterials as drug carriers for cancer therapy has received intensive attention in recent years. It is well recognized that only a small amount of traditional anticancer drugs (e.g., doxorubicin DOX, a kind of commercial chemotherapy drug for cancer treatment) can penetrate into tumors. Moreover, drug molecules are prone to be eliminated by renal clearance and distributed in non-target tissues, leading to an insufficient drug concentration at the tumor sites, and thus limited therapeutic effectiveness. To increase the concentration of therapeutic anticancer drugs at the target sites, design of effective carriers with high loading capacity of drug is recognized as an efficacious strategy. In recent years, various nanomaterials have been employed for the design of high-performance drug carriers with large drug-loading capacity, taking advantages of such unique properties of nanomaterials such as a large porous or hollow interior, a huge surface-to-volume ratio. For example, the DOX loading capacity of mesoporous silica structure-based nanocarriers reached as high as about 1200 mg g~(-1), which was further improved to 2350 mg g~(-1) for graphene-oxide-based nanocarriers. Liu et al. demonstrated that single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) show an ultrahigh loading capacity of the DOX (about 4000 mg g~(-1)). However, those advances remain short of demand for cancer therapy, efforts are still required to develop novel nanomaterial-based drug carriers with a higher drug-loading efficiency.