pH Responsive Copper-Doped Mesoporous Silica Nanocatalyst for Enhanced Chemo-Chemodynamic Tumor Therapy

Chemodynamic therapy (CDT) uses endogenous H2O2 of tumor cells to react with Fenton catalysts to generate highly toxic hydroxyl radical (•OH), thereby killing cancer cells.However, the insufficient endogenous H2O2 and low transport efficiency of nanoparticles result in unsatisfactory anticancer efficacy.In this work, we successfully synthesized a Cu 2+ doped mesoporous silica nanoparticles (Cu-MSN) with excellent dispersity.After loaded with doxorubicin (DOX) and ascorbate (AA), Cu-MSN was coated with folic acid (FA), dimethyl maleic anhydride (DMMA) modified chitosan (FA-CS-DMMA) and carboxymethyl chitosan (CMC) to obtain a pH responsive targeted nanocatalyst FCDC@Cu-MSN@DA.SEM images showed that particle size of FCDC@Cu-MSN@DA was about 100 nm.After 48 h, cumulative amount of Cu 2+ release reached 80% and DOX release was about 57.3% in the acidic environment.After oxidation of AA, the produced exogenous H2O2 induced Cu 2+ to catalytic the Fenton-like reaction, which enhanced the therapeutic effect of tumor chemodynamic therapy (CDT).Cell viability in vitro demonstrated that FCDC@Cu-MSN@DA exhibited excellent anticancer ability in the combination of CDT and chemotherapy.All above data suggested that this multifunctional nanocatalyst has great potential application in cancer therapy in the future.