Limited cellular uptake and inefficient intracellular drug release severely hamper the landscape of polymer drug nanocarriers in cancer chemotherapy. Herein, to address these urgent challenges in tumor treatment simultaneously, we integrated the multivalent choline phosphate (CP) and bioreducible linker into a single polymer chain, designed and synthesized a neoteric bioreducible polymer nanocarrier. The excellent hydrophility of these zwitterionic CP groups endowed high drug loading content and drug loading efficiency of doxorubicin to this drug delivery system (∼22.1 wt %, ∼95.9%). Meanwhile, we found that the multivalent choline phosphate can effectively enhance the internalization efficiency of this drug-loaded nanocarrier over few seconds, and the degree of improvement depended on the CP density in a single polymer chain. In addition, after these nanocarriers entered into the tumor cells, the accelerated cleavage of bioreducible linker made it possible for more cargo escape from the delivery system to cytoplasm to exert their cytostatic effects more efficiently. The enhanced therapeutic efficacy in various cell lines indicated the great potential of this system in anticancer drug delivery applications.
Keywords: bioreducible linker; cancer therapy; cellular internalization; choline phosphate; polymer nanocarriers.