Enhanced preclinical efficacy of tamoxifen developed as alginate-cysteine/disulfide bond reduced albumin nanoparticles

Tamoxifen (TMX) is the most common clinical choice for the treatment of advanced or metastatic estrogen-dependent breast cancer. However, research on new challenging therapies is necessary due to its undesirable side effects and the limitation of the treatment only to the oral route. In this study, the antitumor activity of TMX-loaded nanoparticles based on different mixtures of alginate-cysteine and disulfide bond reduced bovine serum albumin was tested in vivo in MCF-7 nude mice xenograft model. These systems showed an enhancement of the TMX antitumor activity, since lower tumor evolutions and lower tumor growth rates were observed in mice treated with them. Moreover, histological and immunohistochemical studies revealed that treatments with TMX-loaded nanoparticles showed the most regressive and less proliferative tumor tissues. TMX biodistribution studies determined that TMX-loaded nanoparticles caused more accumulation of the drug into the tumor site with undetectable levels of TMX in plasma, reducing the possibility of delivering TMX to other not-targeted organs and, consequently, developing possible side effects. Thus, these TMX nanoparticulate systems are expected to provide a novel approach to the treatment of breast cancer in the future. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.