Low-density lipoprotein decorated and indocyanine green loaded silica nanoparticles for tumor-targeted photothermal therapy of breast cancer

Photothermal therapy (PTT) is well recognized to be a highly reliable way to treat cancer effectively. Nevertheless, the poor tumor targetability and the inferior stability of PTT agents are two remaining difficulties in PTT. As a result, in this study, the silica nanoparticles (SLN) were coated by low-density lipoprotein (LDL) to develop a multifunctional platform (LDL/SLN) to specifically target the LDL receptor (LDLR) overexpressed breast cancer cells. Furthermore, indocyanine green (ICG) was loaded inside LDL/SLN to establish a drug delivery system (DDS) fit for tumor-specific PTT of breast cancer. According to our results, LDL/SLN/ICG was nano-scaled particles with uniform size and reliable stability under physiological condition. Additionally, LDL/SLN/ICG could smartly target the MCF-7 cells that overexpress LDLR. Most importantly, further studies also demonstrated that LDL/SLN/ICG showed beneficial outcome than SLN/ICG. The high stability as well as the moderate size made it suitable to serve as DDS for cancer therapy. Moreover, the LDL modification was able to enhance the tumor accumulation of LDL/SLN/ICG, which finally achieved elevated PTT benefits than other groups. We therefore suggested that LDL/SLN/ICG could be a future alternative for promising tumor-targeted PTT for breast cancer.