RBC membrane camouflaged prussian blue nanoparticles for gamabutolin loading and combined chemo/photothermal therapy of breast cancer

Due to the non-targeted release of anti-cancer agent gamabufotalin (CS-6), conventional chemotherapy using this drug can cause serious side effects, which accordingly result in poor therapeutic efficiency. Recently, the development of smart nanodrug systems has attracted more and more attention due to their significant advantages of high loading efficiency, controllable release behavior and targeted accumulation at tumor sites. In this study, a nanodrug system named as HA@RBC@PB@CS-6 NPs (HRPC) was constructed. In this system, Prussian blue nanoparticles (PB NPs) with hollow porous structure were used as the carrier for CS-6 and photothermal sensitizer simultaneously. The result indicated that the encapsulation of erythrocyte membrane on the PB NPs prolonged the blood circulation life to 10 h and improved the immune evasion ability for more than 60%, as well, which is beneficial for the targeting molecule (HA) to achieve high concentration accumulation of HRPCs at tumor sites. Moreover, we also disclosed that loading drug of CS-6 performed its ultra-strong antitumor function partly through markedly suppressing the expression of HSP70, which conversely amplified the efficiency of photothermal therapy. The in vivo study demonstrated the outstanding performance of HRPC in synergistic photothermal/chemotherapy of cancer without side effect to normal tissues.