Single component image guided 'On-demand' drug delivery system for early stage prostate

The early stage detection, diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer are life-saving events in patients housing potentially invasive disease. The healthy human prostate accumulates the maximum amount of zinc compared to any soft tissue in the body. But in the contrary, an inability of cancer cells to accumulate zinc has been found with the development of malignancy resulting in a dramatic reduction in the zinc content of prostate tissue. In this current study, we designed and developed a dipicolylamine-coumarin-chlorambucil (Dpa-Cm-Cmbl) based system which can act as a sensor (for the prostatic zinc i.e. diagnosis) as well as photoresponsive drug delivery system (treatment). We demonstrated that Dpa-Cm-Cmbl being a single component system, first guided us to locate the diseased area by using cellular zinc concentration as a biomarker and in the next there was on-demand release of anticancer drug chlorambucil by employing the external stimulus light. In-vitro studies showed that Dpa-Cm-Cmbl presents excellent properties like detection of cancerous regions in the prostate, photoregulated drug delivery in controlled manner, biocompatibility and all together an efficient chemotherapy. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.