Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery

Biography

Biography: Li Li

Abstract

Chemotherapy is one of most common cancer treatments in clinics. In most cases, the clinical responses show that the efficacy of chemotherapy is limited by the development of multidrug resistance (MDR) in cancer cells during a long period of treatment. Target-specific delivery and sustained release of anticancer agents and siRNA has attracted considerable research interest in cancer chemotherapy. It is clear that the single treatment by either anticancer drug or siRNA delivered by nanocarriers can only achieve limited success in overcoming the MDR of cancer cells. Thus, the development of an effective strategy to overcome the multidrug resistance in chemotherapy remains a major challenge in the treatment of cancers, where co-delivery of anticancer drugs and siRNA would be a promising strategy.

Recently, hierarchical nanocomposites have attracted great interests in bioapplications such as drug delivery, biomedical imaging, biochemical sensing and biocatalysts owing to their structure features and unique properties.¹ In our group, we have developed hierarchical SiO₂@MgAl-layered double hydroxide nanocomposites (SiO₂@MgAl-LDH) with various functional groups (-NH₂, -SH, -PEG) via nanodot-coating strategy. These nanocomposites have showed enhanced siRNA and drug delivery to cancer cells. The functional SiO₂@MgAl-LDH nanocomposites retained the layered structure and plate-like morphology as MgAl-LDH NPs. Moreover, functional SiO₂@MgAl-LDH showed good dispersion in aqueous solution and cell culture medium. The in vitro tests have demonstrated anticancer drugs or siRNA delivered by functional SiO₂@MgAl-LDH apparently inhibited the cancer cell growth.^{2. 3}