Purpose: To alleviate the sufferings of the chemotherapy patients, we developed a novel active targeted therapeutic system and showed its potential as a promising drug delivery strategy.
Methods: We utilized the human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) ligand-receptor mediation to make an actively targeted drug delivery system with optimal HCG polypeptide fragment as target head base, polyethylene glycol–polylactic acid copolymers as nanometer materials to load chemotherapy drug methotrexate (MTX), to highly selectively deliver MTX into choriocarcinoma lesions, and to investigate the efficacy, targeting and tolerability of the complex in vitro experiments.
Results: Our data show that choriocarcinoma cell lines JEG-3 and JAR exhibited high expression levels of HCG receptor, peptide HCGβ 81-95 specifically bonded to HCG receptor-positive cells and HCG81-NP efficiently delivered MTX to choriocarcinoma cells. HCG81-NP-MTX inhibited cell proliferation and reduced G₀/G₁ to S phase transition in JEG-3 and JAR cells.
Conclusion: We designed an active targeting therapy system of choriocarcinoma, significantly improved chemotherapy efficacy in vitro, and provided a theoretical basis for the treatment of malignant trophoblastic tumors.
Keywords: choriocarcinoma, human chorionic gonadotropin, nanoparticle, methotrexate, cell proliferation