Nanocrystals as novel nanomedicines in cancer
Résumé
Nanomedicine represents alternative solutions to treat patients with cancer limiting toxicity to certain organs related to large systemic amount of drug and providing better accumulation in vascularized tumors. Despite the encapsulation of drugs into nanomedicine, the amount of drugs reaching the tumors were however often considered too low, because of an insufficient encapsulation rate or a lack of stability induc-ing an unfortunate release of drug prior reach-ing the organ of interest. Therefore, reaching a higher encapsulation rate or a better stability could be strongly beneficial for nanomedicine in cancer.
In the UTCBS laboratory, we were interested in nanocrystals. NCs have shown their potential in the late 80s and about 20 NC drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Admin-istration by now in various diseases, although none as anticancer treatments. Therefore, the latter reinforces UTCBS’ endeavors on develop-ing anticancer drug NCs and the legitimacy of these nanoparticles as potent forthcoming de-livery systems for nanomedicines1.
During drug development, various processes involving the physicochemical modulation of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) allow to overcome bioavailability issues2. Their engi-neering optimizes the therapeutic efficacy of drugs with enhanced safety profile, targeting efficiency, and suitability for administration through various routes. Among them, nano-crystallization stands out as it maximizes the loading of the API dispersed in liquid or solid dosage forms. In this context, the UTCBS la-boratory pioneered the solvent/anti-solvent bottom-up approach using a minimal amount of polymer as a stabilizer to develop etoposide nanocrystals (NCs) for anticancer therapies3. We showed that etoposide toxicity was con-served in vitro. The anticancer effect of NCs etoposide was increased as regard to the phar-maceutical drug toposar in 3LL grafted tumor mice models. The method was applied to other drugs such as polyphenol and antioxydants showing the versatility of the approach5.