文摘
Nanomedcine holds great potential in cancer therapy due to its flexibility on drug delivery, protection, releasing, and targeting. Epigenetic drugs, such as 2鈥?deoxy-5-azacytidine (DAC), are able to cause reactive expression of tumor suppressor genes (TSG) in human cancers and, therefore, might be able to enhance the sensitivity of cancer cells to chemotherapy. In this report, we fabricated a lipid鈥損olymer nanoparticle for codelivery of epigenetic drug DAC and traditional chemotherapeutic drug (DOX) to cancer cells and monitored the growth inhibition of the hybrid nanoparticles (NPs) on cancer cells. Our results showed that NPs encapsulating DAC, DOX, or both, could be effectively internalized by cancer cells. More importantly, incorporating DAC into NPs significantly enhanced the sensitivity of cancer cells to DOX by inhibiting cell growth rate and inducing cell apoptosis. Further evidence indicated that DAC encapsulated by NPs was able to rescue the expression of silenced TSG in cancer cells. Overall our work clearly suggested that the resulting lipid鈥損olymer nanoparticle is a potential tool for combining epigenetic therapy and chemotherapy.
Keywords:
drug delivery; chemotherapeutic drug; epigenetic drug; cancer therapy; combined therapy