Chondroitin Sulfate Modified and Chlorin e6 Preloaded Hybrid Nanoparticles for Tumor Targeted Photodynamic Therapy of Breast Cancer

Effective cancer therapy usually requires the assistant of well-designed drug carriers. In order to increase the drug accumulation to tumor tissue as well as reduce the side effect of drug carriers, a hybrid drug delivery system (DDS) composed of chondroitin sulfate (CS) and calcium carbonate (CC) was developed. Photodynamic agent chlorin e6 (Ce6) was preloaded into the CC nanoparticle during the synthesis process of CC nanoparticle. After surface modified with CS, the resulted CS-CC/Ce6 nanoparticles was capable of serving as a biocompatible breast cancer targeting DDS to enhance the photodynamic therapy of breast cancer. Competitive uptake and in vivo imaging results revealed that the obtained CS-CC/Ce6 nanoparticles were spherical particles with size under 100 nm. On the other hand, CS-CC/Ce6 nanoparticles could increase the uptake ratio of Ce6 into MCF-7 breast cancer cells when compared with CS free nanoparticles (CC/Ce6), possibly via the CD44 receptor-mediated endocytosis. It was worth mentioning that both in vitro (MTT assay on MCF-7 cells) and in vivo (anticancer assay on MCF-7 tumor-bearing nude mice model) experiments revealed that CS-CC/Ce6 nanoparticles exhibited stronger photodynamic performance than free Ce6 or CC/Ce6 nanoparticles which could be further extended to clinical administration in our future works.