Crosslinked casein micelles bound paclitaxel as enzyme activated intracellular drug delivery systems for cancer therapy

CUGGINO, JULIO C.; PICCHIO, MATÍAS L.; GUGLIOTTA, AGUSTINA; BÜRGI, MILAGROS; RONCO, LUDMILA I.; CALDERÓN, MARCELO; ETCHEVERRIGARAY, MARINA; ALVAREZ IGARZABAL, CECILIA I.; MINARI, ROQUE J.; GUGLIOTTA, LUIS M.

EUROPEAN POLYMER JOURNAL

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Año: 2021 vol. 145 p. 1 - 1

0014-3057

anomedicine for cancer therapy is a successful tool to diminish the side effect of chemotherapeutics such as paclitaxel (PTX). In this regard, Abraxane®, a human serum albumin (HSA)-based nanomedicine system has shown lesser side effects than Taxol®. However, the large-scale production of HSA protein is limited and expensive, which is traduced in a high cost of the treatments in clinical applications. Thus, the use of easily-available alternative nanocarriers could increment the accessibility of patients to nanomedicine for cancer treatments. Casein is a low-cost protein able to self-assemble into micelles which could efficiently encapsulate PTX into their structure. In this work, the synthesis of chemically crosslinked casein micelles (CCM), used to prepare PTX-based nanoformulations, is presented. CCM@PTX nanoformulations showed promising results in vitro to be applied as nanomedicine for cancer therapy. Thus, the obtained nanoformulations are great candidates to be parenterally adm