Recently, Professor Feng Xuli group at the School of Pharmaceutical Science of Chongqing University published a paper entitled “Clickable Amino acid Tuned Self-Assembly of Nucleus-selective Multi-component Nanoplatform for Synergistic Cancer Therapy”.

The nucleus plays a critical role in most biological cellular processes, and exhibits high sensitivity to various DNA damages, making it a promising target for antitumor therapy. Therefore, they present a sequential self-click-assembly strategy, which utilized amphiphilic amino acid D-K mediated selfassembly to construct multi-component nanoplatforms for nucleus-targeted delivery of photosensitizers and anticancer drugs. The self-assembled nanodrugs showed enhanced cellular uptake and nuclear accumulation of Ce6 and DOX, and could not only significantly improve their cytotoxicity in cancer cells, but minimize side effects. Importantly, the nanodrugs could selectively accumulate and retain in the tumor site, and exhibited optimal tumor growth inhibition via multi-modal tumor suppressive effect induced by PDT and chemotherapy.

Reference:

Lan Yang, Xiao He, Zhiying Zeng, Jiakun Tang, Dongmei Qi, Huijie Ma, Hui Chen*, Xinghai Ning*, Xuli Feng*. Clickable amino acid tuned self-assembly of a nucleus-selective multi-component nanoplatform for synergistic cancer therapy. Chem. Sci. 2021, 12, 8394-8400.