Mechanism of erosion of nanostructured porous silicon drug carriers in neoplastic tissues

Adi Tzur-Balter, Zohar Shatsberg, Margarita Beckerman, Ester Segal () and Natalie Artzi ()
Additional contact information
Adi Tzur-Balter: Technion—Israel Institute of Technology
Zohar Shatsberg: Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Margarita Beckerman: Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ester Segal: Technion—Israel Institute of Technology
Natalie Artzi: Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Nanostructured porous silicon (PSi) is emerging as a promising platform for drug delivery owing to its biocompatibility, degradability and high surface area available for drug loading. The ability to control PSi structure, size and porosity enables programming its in vivo retention, providing tight control over embedded drug release kinetics. In this work, the relationship between the in vitro and in vivo degradation of PSi under (pre)clinically relevant conditions, using breast cancer mouse model, is defined. We show that PSi undergoes enhanced degradation in diseased environment compared with healthy state, owing to the upregulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the tumour vicinity that oxidize the silicon scaffold and catalyse its degradation. We further show that PSi degradation in vitro and in vivo correlates in healthy and diseased states when ROS-free or ROS-containing media are used, respectively. Our work demonstrates that understanding the governing mechanisms associated with specific tissue microenvironment permits predictive material performance.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7208 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms7208

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7208

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().