Glycopolymer modified magnetic mesoporous silica nanoparticles for MR imaging and targeted drug delivery

It is a challenge for cancer therapy to develop efficient and safe transport vehicles. In the current study, glycopolymer modified magnetic mesoporous silica nanoparticles were designed to improve drug bioavailability and anticancer efficacy. The nanoparticles enhanced intracellular uptake by virtue of multivalent binding to glycoprotein receptor over-expressed on the surface of liver cancer cells. Moreover, size of the nanoparticles was adjustable by changing the amount of TEOS and/or galactose monomer. The nanoparticles can be manipulated by an external magnetic field and used for T2-weighted contrast enhancement in magnetic resonance imaging due to the high saturation magnetization (1.5 emu/g). Importantly, the novel nanoparticles had a high loading ability of drug (11.9%), and were taken up by HepG2 cells (10.5%), which was nearly three times more than NIH3T3 cells. Competition inhibition assay further confirmed that the glycopolymer conjugated nanoparticles could target cancer cells via receptor-mediated endocytosis. Hence, the well-defined nanoparticles exhibited great potential in MR imaging and targeted drug delivery. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.