Drug-Induced Self-Assembly of Modified Albumins as Nano-theranostics for Tumor-Targeted Combination Therapy

Paclitaxel (PTX) can bind to human serum albumin (HSA) via hydrophobic interaction, forming Abraxane, which is a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved effective antitumor nanomedicine drug. Herein, the effective antitumor drug PTX is used to induce the self-assembly of HSA modified with either a photosensitizer chlorin e6 (Ce6), which at the same time serves as a chelating agent for Mn(2+) to enable magnetic resonance imaging, or acyclic Arg-Gly-Asp (cRGDyK) peptide that targets αvβ3-integrin overexpressed on tumor angiogenic endothelium. Two types of tumor-targeting theranostic nanoparticles are constructed, either by coassembly of both HSA-Ce6 and HSA-RGD simultaneously or by forming an HSA-Ce6@HSA-RGD core-shell structure, with the assistance of PTX-induced albumin aggregation. Such albumin-based nanoparticles on one hand could targetαvβ3-integrin, as evidenced by both in vitro and in vivo experiments, and on the other hand enable combined photodynamic/chemotherapy, which offers remarkably improved therapeutic efficacy to kill cancer in comparison to the respective monotherapies. Our work presents a new type of tumor-targeted multifunctional albumin-based nanoparticles by drug-induced self-assembly, which is a rather simple method without any sophisticated chemistry or materials engineering and is promising for multimodel imaging-guided combination therapy of cancer.