High-Drug-Loading Mesoporous Silica Nanorods with Reduced Toxicity for Precise Cancer Therapy against Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Nanorod-based drug delivery systems have attracted great interest because of their enhanced cell internalization capacity and improved drug loading property. Herein, novel mesoporous silica nanorods (MSNRs) with different lengths are synthesized and used as nanocarriers to achieve higher drug loading and anticancer activity. As expected, MSNRs-based drug delivery systems can effectively enhance the loading capacity of drugs and penetrate into tumor cells more rapidly than spherical nanoparticles due to their greater surface area and trans-membrane transporting rates. Interestingly, these tailored MSNRs also enhance the cellular uptake of doxorubicin (DOX) in cancer cells, thus significantly enhancing its anticancer efficacy for hundreds of times by inducing of cell apoptosis. Internalized MSNRs-DOX triggers intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) overproduction, which subsequently activates p53 and mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) pathways to promote cell apoptosis. MSNRs-DOX nanosystem also shows prolonged blood circulation time in vivo. In addition, MSNRs-DOX significantly inhibits in vivo tumor growth in nude mice model and effectively reduced its in vivo toxicity. Therefore, this study provides an effective and safe strategy for designing chemotherapeutic agents for precise cancer therapy.