Synergism of cisplatin-oleanolic acid co-loaded hybrid nanoparticles on gastric carcinoma cells for enhanced apoptosis and reversed multidrug resistance.

Combined administration of different drugs is a widely acknowledged approach for effective cancer therapy. However, the limited targeting, as well as inferior drug loading capacities of current drug delivery systems (DDS), are still the bottleneck for better performance in cancer treatment. Herein, we successfully developed a cancer cell membrane (CM) decorated calcium carbonate (CC) hybrid nanoparticles (HN) for the co-delivery of cisplatin (CDDP) and oleanolic acid (OA). The physicochemical property of HN/CDDP/OA was evaluated, which revealed that the as-prepared DDS was core-shell structured and well-dispersed nanoparticles with size around 100 nm. The HN/CDDP/OA showed high stability and biocompatibility with pH-responsive drug release. Moreover, the CM modification in HN also demonstrated highly elevated tumor-homing nature than bare CC. Finally, the feasibility of HN/CDDP/OA in the treatment of gastric cancer (MGC-803 cell line) was assessed. HN/CDDP/OA showed better performance than mono systems with enhanced apoptosis and capable of reversing multidrug resistance (MDR) of cancer cells.

Introduction

At present, cancer chemotherapy is still the most widely adopted approach for cancer therapy (Xiong et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019; Meng et al., 2019). However, due to the developed multidrug resistance (MDR) in many cancer types, the administration of single drug molecule usually fails to effectively control the progress of cancers (Negi et al., 2019; Dei et al., 2019). To the end, the combined administration of different types of drugs are gradually emerged to be an alternative for better performance in cancer therapy (Zou et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018). Previous studies have demonstrated that combination therapy could greatly enhance the cytotoxicity while reducing the dosage, which significantly reduce the unwanted side effects of anticancer drugs. The basic principle for combination therapy is co-deliver at least two drugs targeting different pathways, which ensure the high cytotoxicity to cancer cells (Meng et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019). However, the combination therapy greatly relies on the assistance of drug delivery systems (DDS) to precisely control the dosage, proportion and even the sequence of loaded cargos. Considering that most of the currently adopted DDSs are not able to satisfy the first two basic requirements, the introduction of a well-designed DDS is the prerequisite for effective combination therapy (Meng et al., 2019).

Over the past decades, the development of novel DDS suitable for cancer therapy is research hotspot of pharmaceutical science. Various DDSs based on different materials have been developed to test their feasibility in cancer therapy (Zhao et al., 2018; Li et al., 2018; Xiong et al., 2018). In particular, the outstanding merits of CC nanoparticles, including high biocompatibility, low cost and decent drug loading of different drugs (from hydrophilic to hydrophobic), have made it suitable for chemotherapy of cancers (Wang et al., 2018, 2019). Apart from the carriers, the tumor homing capability of the resulted DDS is another important issue that should be taken into consideration since the availability of drugs is largely dependent on the tumor targetability of the DDS (Tang et al., 2018). In recent years, cancer cell membrane (CM) with the combination of shielding and targeting is becoming the most widely studied material. CM modified DDSs were found to smartly homing the isogenous cancer cells with high efficiency while at the same time can significantly alleviating the liver capture (Rao et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2016).

Cisplatin (CDDP) is one of the most commonly adopted drug for the chemotherapy of various cancers (Cheng et al., 2019). The mechanism for CDDP induced anticancer effect is to form CDDP-DNA adducts and hinder DNA transfection. However, the drug resistance for CDDP has been developed in many cancer types, as confirmed by many clinical observations. Moreover, the severe side effects of CDDP is also another concern which hampered its performance in many clinical trials. As a result, combination therapy is believed to be an ideal regimen to minimize the MDR of tumor cells to and reduce the CDDP related toxic effects (Tu et al., 2010; Tang et al., 2011).

Oleanolic acid (OA) is one of the most abundant triterpenoids in plants, which is known for its critical potentials in regulating many pharmacological processes, especially the antitumor activity (Bao et al., 2015). It has been demonstrated that the anticancer activity of OA is realized through the activation of AMP-activated Protein Kinase (AMPK) pathway, suppression of P13K-AKT-mTOR-NF-κB pathway, upregulation p53 activation and apoptosis pathway. In recent studies, OA has been reported to achieve elevated outcome with enhance apoptosis and reduced side effects when applied with other chemotherapy reagents (Shanmugam et al., 2014; Man et al., 2015). The combination of OA with CDDP was expected to reduce the MDR of CDDP treated cells to enhance the performance of CDDP in a synergetic way.

Here in our study, we choose CDDP and OA for combination therapy due to their distinguished mechanisms in cancer therapy. CM decorated CC as a hybrid nanoparticle (HN) was employed as the delivery vehicle to load both drugs in the same system to finally construct a DDS for chemotherapy of gastric carcinoma.

Materials and experimental procedure

Materials, cell and animal model

All chemical reagents were of analytical pure and from Sigma-Aldrich (St. Louis, MO, USA). The MGC-803 and NIH3T3 cells were cultured in DMEM supplied with 10% FBS. The multicellular tumor spheroid (MS) model was established using previous protocol. In brief, equal number of MGC-803 and NIT3T3 cells was mixed and seeded on 96-well plates (Corning, USA) and then allow to grow into MS (Wang et al., 2019). Male Balb/c nude mice were subjected to tumor implantation according to previous report. MGC-803 were collected and dispersed in PBS to reach an intensity of 2 × 107 cells/mL and injected to the flank of mice (100 μL) to allow tumor formation (Chai et al., 2018).

Preparation of DDS

CaCl2, CDDP and OA were dissolved in 10 mL of ethanol at room temperature under gentle stirring to obtain a clear solution. Afterward, the aqueous solution of (NH4)2CO3 (10 mL) was quickly charged into the ethanol solution with vigorously stirring for 30 s. Afterward, the mixture was stand at room temperature for 30 min to remove the large aggregates. The supernatant was then centrifuged (3000 rpm, 10 min) to obtain the homogeneous nanoparticles loaded with both drugs (CC/CDDP/OA). Nanoparticles loaded with single drug were also prepared using similar protocol (Wang et al., 2017).

The CM was isolated from MGC-803 cells using previous reported procedures. Briefly, cells were subjected to repeated freezing and thawing for 6 times (between liquid nitrogen and room temperature, 10 s a cycle). Afterward, the mixture was centrifuged (3000 rpm, 10 min) to obtain supernatant (4 °C). Finally, the supernatant was processed by an extruder equipped with 0.22 μm membrane for several times to obtain the CM (4 °C). The protein in CM was quantified by BCA kit (Beyotime, China) (Yalcin et al., 2016).

For the coating of CM to CC to construct HN/CDDP/OA, the aqueous solution of CC (1 mg/mL) was mixed with different ratios of CM by vortex. After being sonicated for half an hour (100 W). The HN HN/CDDP/OA was obtained by centrifuging the mixture at 10000 g for 10 min.

Characterization

The particle size distribution of nanoparticles was assessed by Particle Sizing System (Zetasizer Nano ZS, Malvern, UK). The morphology was observed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM, Hitachi HF5000, Hitachi, Japan) without staining at the voltage of 80 kV.

Stability and hemolysis

The stability of HN/CDDP/OA was evaluated by measuring the size changes of nanoparticles in PBS and plasma for 48 h. The hemolysis of HN/CDDP/OA was evaluated by determining the UV absorbance (545 nm) of the supernatant (2% red blood cells of mouse blood) after treated with different concentrations of HN/CDDP/OA.

Drug loading and drug release

The platinum content in DDS was determined by atomic absorption spectroscopy (iCE 3500, Thermos-Fisher, USA). The content of OA was measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (LC-2030, Shimadzu, Japan) with the following conditions: Agilent SB-C18 880975-902 column (4.6 mm, 250 mm, 5 µm); mobile phase was 0.1% TFA aqueous solution: acetonitrile/methanol mixture (17:1) =1:9. The temperature is 30 °C, the flow rate was 1 mL/min and the detection wavelength was 210 nm (Khan et al., 2019).

In vitro anticancer assay

Cells were cultured in 96-well plates and treated with different formulations at different drug concentrations for 48 or 72 h. At the pre-determined time interval, a standard methyl thiazolyl tetrazolium (MTT) assay was applied as previously reported. To determine their synergistic effect, the combination index (CI) was calculated as previously reported (Xiong et al., 2019).

MS was subjected to the treatment of different formulations for 4 days. The changes in MS volume was recorded and plotted against time.

Apoptosis and cell cycle

The cells were treated with apoptosis kit and cell cycle kit (Solabio, China) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Afterward, the cells were subjected to fluorometric analysis using flow cytometry (ACEA NovoCyte, China).

Intracellular uptake and Western blot

Cells were treated with different formulations for different time intervals. At pre-determined time intervals, cells were collected and washed, followed by lysis to fully extract the intracellular CDDP. Finally, the CDDP content was determined as described above.

Coumarin-6 was encapsulated into CM and then employed to construct the DDS. The C6 labeled DDS was then used to study the in vitro cellular uptake of DDS. In brief, cells were pretreated with CM or PBS for 2 h, followed by incubation with different formulations for different time intervals. At each interval, cells were collected and subjected to flow cytometry analysis of intracellular fluorescence intensity.

Cell treated with different formulations for 48 h were collected and lysed by RIPA buffer. The supernatant was collected and loaded onto SDS-PAGE gel for protein separation. Afterward, the proteins were transferred to another PVDF membrane to allow the label of corresponding antibodies. The proteins were revealed by chemiluminescence imager (Invitrogen iBright, Thermo-Fisher, USA).

Tumor targeting assay

To study the in vivo tumor targeting of DDS, DiR was loaded to construct the DiR labeled DDS was injected into MGC-803 tumor-bearing mice through tail vein. At 24 h post-administration, the mice were executed to harvest organs and tumor tissues and then subjected to fluorometric analysis of intensity by imaging equipment (Bio-Real, Geneway, Austria).

In vivo anticancer efficacy

Tumor-bearing mice were selected and randomly grouped into five teams (n = 6). The mice were treated with different formulations at the CDDP dosage of 7.5 mg/kg and OA dosage of 20 mg/kg. The measurement of tumor volume and body weight was repeated 7 times before drug administration once every 2 days.

Statistical analysis

The data were repeated three times in parallel unless otherwise stated and expressed as standard deviation.

Results and discussions

The preparation of HN/CDDP/OA contained two successive steps. Firstly, the CC was prepared using a previous reported co-precipitation method, during which both drugs (CDDP and OA) were loaded into the core of CC to obtain a dual loaded core. The loaded ratio of drugs can be carefully tuned by the charged ratio. Most importantly, the abundant Ca2+ on the surface of CC can serve as a linker to react with the phosphate groups our CM, which resulted in facile anchoring of CM on the surface of CC to offer protection, stabilization and targeting for the DDS. As shown in Figure 1(A), the size distribution of HN/CDDP/OA was uniformly distributed at around 100 nm with a small polydispersion index of 0.074. In addition, the morphology of both nanoparticles was observed using TEM. As displayed in Figure 1(B), CC nanoparticles synthesized by co-precipitation method showed spherical shape with size at about 80 nm. After the introduction of CM, the obtained HN/CDDP/OA showed minor increase on size with a clearly observed corona on the surface of nanoparticles, which suggested the successful preparation of HN/CDDP/OA. The western blot analyze of CM and HN/CDDP/OA revealed similar protein components, with comparable AT1R and CXCR4 detected, which provided decisive evidence to prove that CM was successfully anchored to the corona of HN/CDDP/OA (Figure 1(C)).

Figure 1.

(A) The size distribution of HN/CDDP/OA. (B) The morphology of CC/CDDP/OA and HN/CDDP/OA nanoparticles using TEM. Scale bar: 100 nm. (C) The comparative AT1R and CXCR4 proteins in HN/CDDP/OA and bare CM.

Afterward, the stability of HN/CDDP/OA was studied to reveal the suitability to serve as DDS. As shown in Figure 2(A), although being incubated in two different solutions, the changes of particle size in HN/CDDP/OA were not significant. The results indicated the preferable stability of HN/CDDP/OA under physiological conditions, which satisfied the primary requirement to serve as DDS. Moreover, the hemolysis as another parameter for biocompatibility was also investigated to reveal the safety of HN/CDDP/OA. As shown in Figure 2(B), the HN/CDDP/OA showed a concentration-dependent hemolysis on RCBs. However, it was noted that at the highest concentration of 1 mg/mL, the hemolysis of HN/CDDP/OA was lower than 1.5%, which was much below the warning level of 5%. On the other hand, it was reported that nanoparticles administered intravenously will be dramatically diluted by the circulating blood, which was several orders of magnitude lower than the tested ones. As a result, it was concluded from the results that HN/CDDP/OA was high biocompatible to be a DDS (Tan et al., 2017).

Figure 2.

(A) The time-dependent size changes of HN/CDDP/OA in PBS and plasma for 48 h. (B) The concentration-dependent hemolysis of HN/CDDP/OA against 2% RBC. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

The drug release profile of HN/CDDP/OA under physiological and pathological environments was studied. As shown in Figure 3, under physiological condition (pH 7.4), both CDDP and OA were released slowly from the DDS, with 48.6% of CDDP and 23.9% of OA being released at 120 h post-incubation. In contrast, at pathological environment, the drug release was significantly elevated, which was 90.6% and 68.3% for CDDP and OA, respectively. The significantly increased drug release might due to the pH-responsive decomposition nature of CC, which was beneficial for effective cancer therapy since most of the tumor tissues were well recognized to be more acidic than normal environments.

Figure 3.

The drug release of CDDP and OA from HN/CDDP/OA at pH of 7.4 (A) and 5.5. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

Next, the in vitro anticancer beneficial of HN/CDDP/OA was studied using MTT assay. As shown in Figure 4(A and B), mono delivery system showed certain beneficial on MGC-803 cells as supported by the concentration-dependent decrease of cell viability. The calculated IC50 for CDDP alone was 4.76 μM (48 h) and 2.63 μM (72 h), respectively. The IC50 for OA was calculated to be 176 μM (48 h) and 134 μM (72 h), respectively. In order to find the optimal ratio for the combination therapy, the relation between drug ratios (CDDP/OA, w/w) and CI was summarized. As demonstrated in Figure 4(C), it was concluded that at the w/w ratio of 10, the CI was the lowest, which indicated the combination effect of the drugs was optimal. As a result, the following MTT assay was tested using this ratio unless otherwise stated. The MTT assay at this ratio was further tested under the optimal drug ratio. As illustrated in Figure 5(D), compared to free CDDP or OA, the combination of CDDP and OA can greatly reduce the dosage when achieving the same cytotoxicity. The IC50 was achieved at the dosage of 1.67/16.7 μM for 48 h and 0.89/8.9 μM for 72 h. From results in the above experiments, it was clearly demonstrated that the combination of CDDP and OA was able to greatly increase the anticancer benefit at a low dosage.

Figure 4.

The cell viability revealed by MTT assay after MGC-803 cells treated with HN/CDDP or HN/OA at different CDDP (A) or OA (B) concentrations for 48 and 72 h. (C) The CI of HN/CDDP/OA treated MGC-803 cells for 72 h at different CDDP/OA ratios (w/w). (D) The in vitro anticancer effect of HN/CDDP/OA (CDDP:OA = 10, w/w) at different drug concentrations. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

Figure 5.

The volume variations (A) and optical images of MS treated with different formulations. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

In order to further confirm this conclusion, the MS model was further employed to test the anticancer effect of different formulations. As shown in Figure 6(A), mono deliver systems only demonstrated moderate benefits in cancer therapy while the co-delivery of both drugs was demonstrated to greatly evaluate the performance, which finally resulted in reverse in MS volume as compared to other groups. The pictures captured at the end of the assay in Figure 6(B) also reached similar conclusions.

Figure 6.

(A) The apoptosis of MGC-803 cells treated with different formulations at the drug concentration of 0.89/8.9 μM for 72 h. (B) The cell cycle variations of MGC-803 cells treated with HN/CDDP/OA for different time intervals. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

Next, with the aim to test the mechanisms responsible for the elevated anticancer benefit. The apoptosis in different formulations were investigated. As demonstrated in Figure 6(A), at 72 h post-incubation under the same drug concentration (0.89/8.9 μM), the HN/CDDP group showed 43.6% of apoptosis while HN/OA showed only 31.4% of apoptosis. In contrast, the apoptosis in HN/CDDP/OA group was significantly elevated to 76.4% under the same condition. The investigation of changes in cell cycles also revealed interesting results. As displayed in Figure 6(B), the combination therapy of HN/CDDP/OA revealed that the synergetic effects of both drugs were able to increase the arrest in G0/G1 phase and reduce the percentage of S phase. More importantly, the effect was positively related to incubation time. It was widely recognized that the S phase indicated the division of cells, the arrest in G0/G1 phase and reduce in S phase both indicated the impaired proliferation of cancer cells, which was beneficial in cancer therapy.

Moreover, the reverse of MDR in MGC-803 cells were further explored by investigating the intracellular time-dependent drug accumulation of CDDP. As shown in Figure 7(A), compared with mono delivery system, the co-delivery of CDDP and OA resulted enhanced drug accumulation in cells, which was positively related to incubation time. As a result, it was suggested that the integration of OA into the DDS could significantly reverse the MDR in MGC-803 cells, which was beneficial for the accumulation of CDDP in cells for better performance. Afterward, the variations of cellular protein levels were detected using western blot to illuminate the reasons responsible for the reverse of MDR. As shown in Figure 7(B), it was interesting to note that the mono delivery of CDDP was able to trigger P-gp overexpression in MGC-803 cells, which was in line with previous report that chemotherapy was responsible for the acquired MDR in cancer cell lines. Most importantly, the treatment of OA containing formulations significantly reduced the expression of P-gp proteins in MGC-803 cells as compared to OA deficient group, which were comparable in downregulating the P-gp levels. Therefore, it was inferred that the OA could effectively reverse the MDR induced by CDDP through the downregulation of P-gp expression (Wen et al., 2016; Sun et al., 2016).

Figure 7.

(A) The intracellular drug concentration of MGC-803 cells treated with different formulations for different time intervals. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation. (B) The western blot assay of protein variations after MGC-803 cells treated with different formulations for 72 h.

Next, the in vitro and in vivo targeting of HN was studied. The time-dependent and competitive cellular uptake was firstly adopted to study the in vitro targeting of HN. C6 was integrated into the DDS to be an indicator to reveal the uptake profile of different nanoparticles. As demonstrated in Figure 8(A), it was clearly observed that the intracellular uptake of all formulations was positively related to incubation time, which suggested that extended incubation resulted in higher accumulation of nanoparticles within cells. However, free C6 showed relatively slow accumulation in cells, which indicated that free drugs with hydrophobic nature could hardly uptaken by cells. Most importantly, cells treated with nanoparticles showed elevated C6 signal in cells, which was consistent with previous reports that nanoparticles could facilitate the internalization of drugs into cells (Davis et al., 2014; Vilella et al., 2015). Moreover, it was noted that the fluorescence intensity in HN-treated group was 1.76- fold higher than that CC-treated group after incubation for 6 h, which suggested the possibility of preferable uptake of HN in MGC-803 cells. In order to verify this suggestion, the comparative experiment was conducted using free CM as the competitor. After exposure to excess of CM for 2 h, the intracellular C6 signals in different groups were recorded and compared. As expected, the intracellular uptake of HN suffered serious decline in MGC-803 cells after CM pretreatment, while insignificant changes were shown in CC-treated MGC-803 cells. Those phenomena strongly suggested that the surface-anchored CM was involved in the variations of cellular uptake between different formulations, which suggested that CM modification might be able to guide the DDS to homologous cells with same membrane components (Xue et al., 2017).

Figure 8.

The in vitro (A) and in vivo (B) targeting assays of HN/CDDP/OA. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

Surface decoration of CM was shown to promote the accumulation of DDS in MGC-803 cells. Whether this effect could also be realized in living lives was also investigated to show the potential of HN for in vivo application. As shown in Figure 8(B), CC and HN were labeled with ICG and then injected intravenously to the MGC-803 oxengrafted mice. At 24 h post nanoparticle administration, the mice were sacrificed to harvest the organs and tumor to determine the fluorescence signals using ex vivo imaging. In line with results in Figure 8(A), the HN/ICG showed 3.02- fold of fluorescence signal in tumor than CC/ICG group while the intensity in liver was only 21.4% of CC/ICG group. The above observations clearly demonstrated that the tumor-targeting nature of CM could not only realize enhanced cellular uptake on cellular level, but also capable of guiding the HN to accumulate in the in vivo tumor tissue with reduced capture by liver (Semalty et al., 2009).

Eventually, the in vivo antitumor efficacy of the DDS was assessed using MGC-803 xenografted model. The changes in tumor growth and body weight were detail recorded twice a day before drug administration. As shown in Figure 9(A), in line with MTT assay, the anticancer performance of different formulations followed the order of HN/CDDP/OA > HN/CDDP > HN/OA≈free CDDP. From these results, we were able to conclude that DDS was capable of effectively delivering the drug for enhanced anticancer outcome since the anticancer effect of HN/CDDP was much better than that of free CDDP. Most importantly, the in vivo experiments further confirmed the combination therapy of CDDP was much more superior than monotherapy. In addition, the variations of body weight in Figure 9(B) also gave some interesting information. First of all, it was realized that free CDDP without the aid of DDS was not suitable for cancer therapy since it caused severe loss of body weight during the test, which suggested that the side effect of CDDP significantly impaired the health of the subjects (Wang et al., 2019). In contrast, with the help of DDS, the HN/CDDP showed almost no adverse effects on the subjects, which was comparable to that of HN/CDDP/OA. In all, it was suggested that HN/CDDP/OA was a highly biocompatible DDS with significantly elevated anticancer benefits than mono delivery systems (Natarajan et al., 2008; Gao et al., 2017).

Figure 9.

The tumor volume (A) and body weight (B) variations of MGC-803 tumor-bearing mice treated with different formulations. Data were repeated thrice and expressed as standard deviation.

Conclusion

In our study, we have fabricated a multifunction DDS capable of delivering CDDP and OA in the same platform for synergetic chemotherapy of gastric carcinoma (HN/CDDP/OA). The results revealed that HN/CDDP/OA was stable DDS with high biocompatibility. Moreover, HN/CDDP/OA showed pH-responsive drug release with over 90% of cumulative drug release at pH 5.5 for 120 h and preferable tumor targeting with nearly 2-fold elevation in tissue accumulation. Most importantly, the in vitro and in vivo anticancer benefits of HN/CDDP/OA were both greatly elevated as compared to mono delivery systems, which could reverse the MDR, increase apoptosis and cell arrest of treated cancer cells.