Doxorubicin-loaded silicon nanowires for the treatment of drug-resistant cancer cells.

Multidrug resistance (MDR) remains a major challenge for cancer treatment thus far. Free doxorubicin (DOX, one of the most widely used chemotherapy agents for cancer treatment) generally features a large value of resistant factor (RF), which is regarded as a significant parameter to assess therapeutic efficiency of cross-resistance. To address this issue, we herein present a kind of silicon nanowires (SiNWs)-based drug nanocarriers (SiNW-DOX), which is high-efficacy for treatment of drug-resistant cancer cells. Typically, drug-resistance cancer cells (e.g., MCF-7/ADR cells) can be significantly inhibited by the SiNWs-based nanocarriers, exhibiting ∼10% cell viability during 72-h incubation with the SiNWs-DOX (80 μg mL(-1) DOX), which is in sharp contrast to free DOX-treated cells preserving ∼40% cell viability. Remarkably, the RF value of SiNW-DOX is as low as ∼2.0, which is much better than that (∼300) of free DOX under the same experiment conditions. To the best of our knowledge, it is the lowest RF value ever reported by nanomaterials-based drug carriers (3.3-24.7).