Fabrication of the biomimetic DOX/Au@Pt nanoparticles hybrid nanostructures for the combinational chemo/photothermal cancer therapy

Abstract

The emergence of the biomimetic nano-drug delivery system provides a feasible way for the clinical treatment of cancer. Noble metal nanomaterials often possess unique and intriguing physicochemical properties, optical properties, electromagnetic properties and catalytic properties, therefore have broad applications in the field of biomedicine. In this work, the porous Au@Pt bimetallic nanoparticles were synthesized via the blending of the chloroauric acid (a gold precursor) with the potassium chloroplatinate (a platinum precursor) at the ratio of 1:1. These Au@Pt NPs exhibited decent catalytic properties, high drug loading capacity (32.3%) and high photothermal conversion efficiency (44.1%). Based on the resultant Au@Pt NPs, a cell membrane-coated photothermal nano-drug delivery system (i.e. the DOX/Au@Pt-M-NPs) was formulated by loading the Doxorubicin (DOX) onto the Au@Pt nanoparticles, which showed a stronger inhibitory effect on tumor cells. The use of the HeLa tumor cell membrane coating demonstrated significantly reinforcing effect on the absorption of the DOX/Au@Pt-M-NPs by tumor cells because of homologous targeting. The cytotoxicity and apoptosis rate of the DOX/Au@Pt-M-NPs group (73.4%) were significantly higher than that of the Au@Pt group (49%). In addition, the damage to major organs caused by the DOX/Au@Pt-M nanoparticle group was significantly lower than that by the DOX/Au@Pt nanoparticle group and the pure DOX group. Taken together, our work demonstrated that nanomedicine carriers camouflaged by tumor cell membranes combined with photothermal therapy and chemotherapy would have potential use in clinical tumor treatment.