Ultrasmall nanostructured drug based pH-sensitive liposome for effective treatment of drug-resistant tumor

Background Cancer cells always develop ways to resist and evade chemotherapy. To overcome this obstacle, herein, we introduce a programmatic release drug delivery system that imparts avoiding drug efflux and nuclear transport in synchrony via a simple nanostructured drug strategy. Results The programmatic liposome-based nanostructured drugs (LNSD) contained two modules: doxorubicin (DOX) loaded into tetrahedral DNA (TD, 10 nm) to form small nanostructured DOX, and the nanostructured DOX was encapsulated into the pH-sensitive liposomes. In the in vitro and in vivo studies, LNSD shows multiple benefits for drug resistance tumor treatment: (1) not only enhanced the cellular DOX uptake, but also maintained DOX concentration in an optimum level in resistant tumor cells via nanostructure induced anti-efflux effect; (2) small nanostructured DOX efficiently entered into cell nuclear via size depended nuclear-transport for enhanced treatment; (3) improved the pharmacokinetics and biodistribution via reducing DOX leakage during circulation. Conclusions The system developed in this study has the potential to provide new therapies for drug-resistant tumor.