Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

College of Pharmacy

Sub-Department

Pharmaceutical Sciences

First Advisor

Peisheng Xu

Abstract

Cancer is one of the leading causes of human mortality and mortality in all diseases. There has been a boost in developing nanocarrier-based therapies for treating cancer or other diseases during the past decade. One of the major advantages about nanocarrier (with the size range from 1-1000 nm) lies in its ability to specifically target tumor and maximize drug accumulation in tumor foci through the enhanced permeability and retention effect. Advancement in nanotechnology has opened a new paradigm in pharmaceutical field. But new challenges have to be overcome in order to fully exploit the technology and improve safety in clinical application.

To improve their performance, at least two types of multifunctional nanocarriers are being developed in our lab. The first type of nanocarrier is glycol chitosan based polymer delivery system, which is a one-step preparation system, with excellent loading capacity. We can use the nanocarrier to guide its loading cargo such as anticancer agents to release in a particular subcellular location, or to load multiple drugs together to increase therapeutic efficacy. The other system is a gold nanoparticle gated mesoporous silica hybrid system, by which we are able to simultaneously execute multiple anticancer therapies such as the combination of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy. Compared with the first generation of nano-delivery system, our new nanocarrier enters cells more efficiently through sigma 2 receptors. Moreover, it can serve as a diagnostic tool through PET (Positron emission tomography), and our study shows that it is able to detect all the spontaneously lung tumors. We believe that these multifunctional nanocarriers have the potential benefits in various areas of current pharmaceutical research including cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Rights

© 2016, Bei Cheng

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