Facile Synthesis of Dendritic Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for Co-loading of Doxorubicin and Hemoglobin

Abstract

Tumor hypoxia is a ubiquitous factor to cause the therapeutic resistance of drug or other treatments. To solve this problem, a facile biophase stratification approach was developed to fabricate dendritic mesoporous silica nanoparticles (DMSNs) with small particle size of 65 nm, high dispersity and excellent biostability through simply controlling the oil-water interfacial reaction. The resultant DMSNs were characterized by various techniques such as scanning electron microscope (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), and N 2 adsorption-desorption analysis, etc. It is verified that DMSNs possess two types of pore size (2.7 nm and 5.4-6.8 nm), high specific surface (654.52 m 2 /g) and pore volume (1.26 cm 3 /g), which are capable to co-load DOX and Hb, simultaneously. Moreover, the mesopore size in the dendritic mesoporous layer could be tuned by changing the amounts of triethanolamine (TEA). The testing results from drug release, flow cytometry histograms, confocal laser scanning microscopy, and cell cytotoxicity demonstrate that DMSNs possess high efficiency of drug release (75.6%), durable releasing period (48 h) and significantly enhanced cell lethality (IC 50 = 20.6 μg/mL). These data demonstrate that such kind of dentritic mesoporous silica naoparticles has great potentials in drug delivery and tumor chemotherapy.