Institute of Clinical Physiology, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Siena, Italy.
PLoS One. 2011 Feb 23;6(2):e17132. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017132.
Cytotoxic chemotherapy of cancer is limited by serious, sometimes life-threatening, side effects that arise from toxicities to sensitive normal cells because the therapies are not selective for malignant cells. So how can they be selectively improved? Alternative pharmaceutical formulations of anti-cancer agents have been investigated in order to improve conventional chemotherapy treatment. These formulations are associated with problems like severe toxic side effects on healthy organs, drug resistance and limited access of the drug to the tumor sites suggested the need to focus on site-specific controlled drug delivery systems. In response to these concerns, we have developed a new drug delivery system based on magnetic erythrocytes engineered with a viral spike fusion protein. This new erythrocyte-based drug delivery system has the potential for magnetic-controlled site-specific localization and highly efficient fusion capability with the targeted cells. Here we show that the erythro-magneto-HA virosomes drug delivery system is able to attach and fuse with the target cells and to efficiently release therapeutic compounds inside the cells. The efficacy of the anti-cancer drug employed is increased and the dose required is 10 time less than that needed with conventional therapy.
癌症的细胞毒性化疗受到严重的、有时危及生命的副作用的限制，这些副作用是由于对敏感的正常细胞的毒性而产生的，因为这些疗法对恶性细胞没有选择性。那么如何才能提高它们的选择性呢？为了改善传统的化疗治疗，人们研究了抗癌药物的替代药物制剂。这些制剂与严重的毒副作用有关，会对健康器官造成损害，而且药物对肿瘤部位的作用有限，这表明有必要关注针对特定部位的控释药物输送系统。针对这些问题，我们开发了一种基于磁性红细胞的新型药物输送系统，该系统由带有病毒刺突融合蛋白的红细胞工程化而成。这种新的基于红细胞的药物输送系统具有磁性控制的靶向定位和与靶向细胞高效融合的潜力。在这里，我们证明了基于红细胞的磁-血凝素 virosomes 药物输送系统能够与靶细胞结合并融合，并且能够有效地将治疗化合物释放到细胞内。所使用的抗癌药物的疗效得到提高，所需剂量比传统疗法少 10 倍。
