Integration of two or more drugs into a multiagent delivery system has been considered to have profound impact on both in vitro and in vivo cancer treatment due to their efficient synergistic effect. This study presents a cheap and simple chitosan hydrogel cross-linked with telechelic difunctional poly(ethylene glycol) (DF-PEG-DF) for synthesis of an injectable and self-healing thermosensitive dual-drug-loaded magnetic hydrogel (DDMH), which contains both doxorubicin (DOX) and docetaxel (DTX) for chemotherapy and iron oxide for magnetic hyperthermia induced stimuli responsive drug release. The as-prepared DDMH not only have good biocompatibility but also exhibit unique self-healing, injectable, asynchronous control release properties. Meanwhile, it shows an excellent magnetic field responsive heat-inducing property, which means that DDMH will produce a large amount of heat to control the surrounding temperature under the alternative magnetic field (AMF). A remarkably improved synergistic effect to triple negative breast cancer cell line is obtained by comparing the therapeutic effect of codelivery of DOX and DTX/PLGA nanoparticles (DTX/PLGA NPs) with DOX or DTX/PLGA NPs alone. In vivo results showed that DDMH exhibited significant higher antitumor efficacy of reducing tumor size compared to single drug-loaded hydrogel. Meanwhile, the AMF-trigger control release of drugs in codelivery system has a more efficient antitumor effect of cancer chemotherapy, indicating that DDMH was a promising multiagent codelivery system for synergistic chemotherapy in the cancer treatment field.
Keywords: breast cancer; chemotherapy; co-delivery system; control release; magnetic hydrogel; multidrug resistance.