An 'all in one' approach for simultaneous chemotherapeutic, photothermal and magnetic hyperthermia mediated by hybrid magnetic nanoparticles

Nanoscience and nanotechnology utilize nanoparticles to provide several remarkable applications in biomedical fields such as bio imaging, diagnosis of several diseases, and efficient drug delivery. Multifunctional magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) are a significant type of nanomaterials that are capable of developing therapeutic as well as diagnostic (theragnostic) applications. Multifunctional hybrid magnetic nanoparticles, as efficient theragnostic representatives, have been developed. The hybrid magnetic nanoparticles (HMNP)-Au-MNPs have been assimilated into PLGA NPs along with two potent chemotherapeutic agents (curcumin and gemcitabine). Delivering chemotherapeutics into cancer cells with multiple targeting moieties is an attractive area in cancer therapeutics. In this study, the nanoconjugates have been tailored to target the pancreatic and breast cancer cells by attaching three specific targeting ligands (folate, transferrin and AS1411 aptamer). Moreover, we report a nanoparticle-based delivery system that can deliver therapeutic cargos to the cancer cells and can exert its lethality by three distinctive modes (chemotherapeutic, photothermal and magnetic hyperthermia) either independently or by the synergistic action of drug and hyperthermia. Overall our results display an 'all in one' approach with the same nanoformulation for the combined destruction of cancer cells. The developed nanoformulation was highly versatile in terms of the choice of implementing lethality, depending on the cancer type.