Hollow mesoporous carbon modified with cRGD peptide nanoplatform for targeted drug delivery and chemo-photothermal therapy of prostatic carcinoma

The exploration of drug delivery systems based on mesoporous structure materials shows great promise in nanomedcine. Herein, a multifunctional nanoplatform based on cyclic arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (cRGD) peptide-conjugated hollow mesoporous carbon nanoparticles (cRGD-HMCN) was developed to realize near-infrared (NIR)/pH-responsive drug release and targeted chemo-photothermal therapy. The cRGD-HMCN exhibited a high doxorubicin (DOX) loading efficiency of 246 μg/mg cRGD-HMCN and pH/NIR-responsive controlled drug release behavior. Also, taking the advantage of the high photothermal conversion efficiency, the HMCN could serve as a photothermal agent to realize photothermal therapy. The in vitro experimental results confirmed that DOX-loaded cRGD-HMCN (cRGD-HMCN@DOX) can significantly improve the therapeutic efficacy toward PC3 cells upon NIR laser irradiation, which was significantly more potent than that for non-targeted HMCN@DOX. More importantly, in vivo data from in the prostatic carcinoma (PC3) xenograft mouse model show that the tumor growth is effectively inhibited by treatment with cRGD-HMCN@DOX plus NIR irradiation with fewer side effects. Importantly, the synergistic group showed superior tumor growth inhibition as compared to that of nontargeted group and any monotherapy. Thus, it is expected that the HMCN could be a potential nanosystem to realizesynergistic chemo-photothermal therapy for cancer treatment.