Abstract: Chemotherapy has been widely used in breast cancer patients to reduce tumor size. However, most anticancer agents cannot differentiate between cancerous and normal cells, resulting in severe systemic toxicity. In addition, acquired drug resistance during the chemotherapy treatment further decreases treatment efficacy. With the proper treatment strategy, nanodrug carriers, such as liposomes/immunoliposomes, may be able to reduce undesired side effects of chemotherapy, to overcome the acquired multidrug resistance, and to further improve the treatment efficacy. In this study, a novel combinational targeted drug delivery system was developed by encapsulating antiangiogenesis drug bevacizumab into liposomes and encapsulating chemotherapy drug doxorubicin (DOX) into immunoliposomes where the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) antibody was used as a targeting ligand. This novel combinational system was tested in vitro using a HER2 positive and multidrug resistant breast cancer cell line (BT-474/MDR), and in vivo using a xenograft mouse tumor model. In vitro cell culture experiments show that immunoliposome delivery led to a high cell nucleus accumulation of DOX, whereas free DOX was observed mostly near the cell membrane and in cytoplasm due to the action of P-gp. Combining liposomal bevacizumab with immunoliposomal DOX achieved the best tumor growth inhibition and the lowest toxicity. Tumor size decreased steadily within a 60-day observation period indicating a potential synergistic effect between DOX and bevacizumab through the targeted delivery. Our findings clearly indicate that tumor growth was significantly delayed in the combinational liposomal drug delivery group. This novel combinational therapy has great potential for the treatment of patients with HER2/MDR double positive breast cancer.
Keywords: immunoliposome, targeted drug delivery, xenograft mouse tumor model, combination therapy, multidrug resistance