Doxorubicin-loaded silicon nanowires for the treatment of drug-resistant cancer cells

Multidrug resistance (MDR) remains a major challenge for cancer treatment thus far. Free doxorubicin (DOX, one of the most widely used chemotherapy agents for cancer treatment) generally features a large value of resistant factor (RF), which is regarded as a significant parameter to assess therapeutic efficiency of cross-resistance. To address this issue, we herein present a kind of silicon nanowires (SiNWs)-based drug nanocarriers (SiNW-DOX), which is high-efficacy for treatment of drug-resistant cancer cells. Typically, drug-resistance cancer cells (e.g., MCF-7/ADR cells) can be significantly inhibited by the SiNWs-based nanocarriers, exhibiting similar to 10% cell viability during 72-h incubation with the SiNWs-DOX (80 mu g mL(-1) DOX), which is in sharp contrast to free DOX-treated cells preserving similar to 40% cell viability. Remarkably, the RF value of SiNW-DOX is as low as similar to 2.0, which is much better than that (similar to 300) of free DOX under the same experiment conditions. To the best of our knowledge, it is the lowest RF value ever reported by nanomaterials-based drug carriers (3.3-24.7). (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.