Background Improving the water solubility of hydrophobic drugs, increasing their accumulation in tumor tissue and allowing their simultaneous action by different pathways are essential issues for a successful chemotherapeutic activity in cancer treatment. Considering potential clinical application in the future, it will be promising to achieve such purposes by developing new biocompatible hybrid nanocarriers with multimodal therapeutic activity. Results We designed and characterised a hybrid nanocarrier based on human serum albumin/chitosan nanoparticles (HSA/chitosan NPs) able to encapsulate free docetaxel (DTX) and doxorubicin-modified gold nanorods (DOXO-GNRs) to simultaneously exploit the complementary chemotherapeutic activities of both antineoplasic compounds together with the plasmonic optical properties of the embedded GNRs for plasmonic-based photothermal therapy (PPTT). DOXO was assembled onto GNR surfaces following a layer-by-layer (LbL) coating strategy, which allowed to partially control its release quasi-independently release regarding DTX under the use of near infrared (NIR)-light laser stimulation of GNRs. In vitro cytotoxicity experiments using triple negative breast MDA-MB-231 cancer cells showed that the developed dual drug encapsulation approach produces a strong synergistic toxic effect to tumoral cells compared to the administration of the combined free drugs; additionally, PPTT enhances the cytostatic efficacy allowing cell toxicities close to 90% after a single low irradiation dose and keeping apoptosis as the main cell death mechanism. Conclusions This work demonstrates that by means of a rational design, a single hybrid nanoconstruct can simultaneously supply complementary therapeutic strategies to treat tumors and, in particular, metastatic breast cancers with good results making use of its stimuli-responsiveness as well as its inherent physico-chemical properties.

No abstract