Smart Therapeutic Strategy of pH-Responsive Gold Nanoparticles for Combating Multidrug Resistance

As several multi-target drug delivery approaches are successfully identified through preclinical screening, their clinical success is often hampered by challenges such as poor circulation stability, dissimilarities in the pharmacokinetics of different drugs, as well as targeting inefficiency. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are adopted as promising nanocarriers in the co-delivery of multiple therapeutic drugs for combination therapy. The pH-responsive AuNPs are synthesized and incorporated with multiple chemotherapeutic drugs, such as doxorubicin and bleomycin. Such structures can work as drug carriers to treat cervical carcinoma by adopting a quality by design approach. The designed nanocarrier is characterized by adopting a range of physicochemical and morphological techniques. In vitro drug release and cytotoxicity of optimized nanocarriers are assessed to cervical tumor epithelial cells. The results highlight the notable advantages of colloidal AuNPs, including sustained drug release, therapeutic agent delivery with high stability, and biocompatibility for more effective treatment of cervical carcinoma. Furthermore, by improving the biodistribution and/or bioavailability profiles, it is believed that the two-in-one approach may therefore give evidence on the fate of co-loaded nanocarrier as a promising trajectory for successful clinical translation against ovarian carcinoma to achieve maximum therapeutic synergy for an individual patient.