ABSTRACT
Various drug delivery and drug targeting systems-based soluble polymers, nanoparticles made of natural and synthetic polymers, nanocapsules, lipoproteins, liposomes, micelles, and many other pharmaceutical carriers are widely used to minimize drug degradation and loss upon administration, prevent harmful or undesirable side-effects, and increase drug bioavailability. The use of lipid moieties as hydrophobic blocks capping hydrophilic polymer chains can provide additional advantages for particle stability when compared with conventional amphiphilic polymer micelles because of the existence of two fatty acid acyls that may considerably contribute to an increase in the hydrophobic interactions in the micelle’s core. The micelle-coupled antibodies preserve their specific activity, and immunomicelles prepared with the use of the cancer-specific monoclonal antibody 2C5 (mAb 2C5) specifically bind to different cancer cells in vitro, demonstrating increased accumulation in experimental tumors in vivo. Being loaded with poorly soluble anti-cancer drugs, mAb 2C5-immunomicelles demonstrate significantly increased cytotoxicity toward tumor cells in vitro and in vivo.
