Self-assembled micelles of the natural medicine ginsenosides for cancer metastasis therapy

Abstract

The nanocarrier-based drug delivery systems have become an alternative strategy for cancer treatment. Whereas, increasing studies find that the utilization of drug carriers may result in poor biocompatibility, lower drug loading capacity and unpredictable side reactions. Therefore, we herein reported self-assembled micelles based on herbal product ginsenosides, which are the main active ingredients of Panax ginseng C.A. The ginsenosides-based micelle system exerts excellent biosafety, better stability, high drug capacity, and lower cytotoxicity compared to free ginsenosides. Meanwhile, ginsenosides micelles exhibits superior inhibitory effects on cancer cell adhesion activity, especially the expression of intercellular adhesion molecule-1, which is the critical factor of cancer metastasis. Importantly, ginsenosides micelles results in remarkably therapeutic efficacy on lung metastasis of liver cancer. All these results highlight the potential utilization of ginsenosides micelles in the clinic. Meanwhile, the carrier-free nano-drugs self-delivery system of ginsenosides showed great promise to become an emerging approach for cancer metastasis therapy.