Development of a targeted drug delivery system for breast cancer treatment

Abstract

Cancer is a group of diseases that constitutes one of the most concerning pathologies worldwide, affecting a wide range of the population. It is expected that the number of diagnosed cases will increase over the next decades. It has been, and still is, widely studied. The traditional treatments present with a significant amount of downside effects due to being mainly systemic treatments and their unavoidable off-target effect on healthy tissue. For this reason, research has been focusing on developing new and more effective treatments. Two of the approaches that have gained relevance in the past years are drug encapsulation and targeted drug delivery. The reduction of the organism’s exposure to the drug and the reduction of off-target effects the main lines of action behind them. The present project has studied the possibility of utilising SMA2000 lipids nanoparticles (SMALPs), which are disc-shaped nanoparticles commonly utilised in membrane protein studies, as a drug encapsulation system for doxorubicin (DOX), and utilising neurotensin (NT), which has already been demonstrated to successfully act as a targeting molecule, as a labelling system to target the cancer cells. Different SMALP compositions were developed, analysed (DLS, SEC and HPLC), and tested in vitro (MTT assay, colony formation assay and sea horse) into different cell lines (HEK293t, MCF7 and MCF10). The results obtained show that the encapsulated DOX is less toxic for healthy cells than the free drug, and DOX loaded NT labelled SMALPs have a higher toxic effect in breast cancer cells overexpressing NT receptor I (NTS1). Presenting SMALPs as a promising technology for drug encapsulation and targeted drug delivery.