An oroxylin A-loaded aggregation-induced emission active polymeric system greatly increased the antitumor efficacy against squamous cell carcinoma.

Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is a usually responds poorly to treatment suffers from poor therapeutic benefits while oroxylin A (OA) is a promising flavonoid with high anticancer efficacy against various cancer types. Here in our study, in order to reveal the potential of OA based drug delivery systems (DDSs) in the treatment of SCC, we firstly revealed that OA had a certain pharmacodynamic effect on skin SCC (A431 cells). Afterwards, OA was loaded into a newly synthesized aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active polymer to construct OA-loaded PDots for the first time. Our results revealed that OA-loaded PDots showed preferable drug loading and enhanced stability. Moreover, the DDS was also capable of self-illumination in the aggregate state to reveal the uptake profile. Most importantly, the DDS showed much more elevated anticancer benefits than free OA in vitro and advanced tumor targetability in vivo, suggesting that it might be a promising system against SCC.