Liposome co-delivery system for tumor combination therapy

Liposomes
Malignant tumors are the number one killer that poses a serious threat to human health.
Currently, the main methods of clinical treatment of malignant tumors include surgery,
chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, surgical treatment cannot target patients with
metastasis, and only surgery can be performed on patients with early cancer. Chemotherapy
and radiotherapy have strong toxic side effects, which may cause damage to the patient's
immune system and hematopoietic system. The use of combined medication in clinical
treatment of malignant tumors, based on two or more drugs combined with the treatment of
cancer has become a common program of clinical oncology treatment The combination of
different drugs, complement each other, play a synergistic role, enhance anti-tumor activity,
Reduce toxic side effects.

However, different drugs have different pharmacokinetic properties in vivo due to their
different physicochemical properties, resulting in different drug distribution ratios in tumor
tissues, so that the combination of drugs does not achieve the expected therapeutic effect.
In recent years, with the rapid development of nanotechnology, liposome as a drug delivery
system can improve the distribution of drugs in vivo, increase the concentration of drugs in
tumor sites, and reduce toxic side effects. Many liposome preparations with multiple
antineoplastic drugs have been marketed and used for clinical treatment of tumors. The
liposome-based co-delivery system can deliver a variety of drugs to tumor sites and enhance
the synergistic effect of drugs, which has great development potential and market prospects.

Composition of liposomes
The main components of liposomes are phospholipids and cholesterol. Commonly used
phospholipid materials are phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylinositol,
and phosphatidic acid. The cell membrane lipid bilayer is mainly composed of phospholipids,
so the phospholipid has low toxicity and good biocompatibility.

Advantages of liposome application

Compared with free drugs, liposomal drugs can improve the stability of drugs, prolong the
half-life in vivo, and improve the targeting and permeability of drugs to tumor tissues.
Compared to other nano-delivery systems, liposomes can not only load hydrophilic and
hydrophobic drugs but also have the advantages of wide source of materials, good
biocompatibility, biodegradability, low immunogenicity and low toxicity. Therefore, liposomes
have a good application prospect in the field of drug delivery.

Clinical application of liposome co-delivery system

Currently, many liposome co-delivery systems are undergoing preclinical studies. For
example, pharmacokinetic experiments with vincristine and topotecan liposomes showed that
Compared with the half-life of vincristine free drug, the half-life of liposomes of vincristine
co-loaded and topotecan are longer. The results of in vivo pharmacodynamic experiments
demonstrated that co-delivering liposomes significantly prolonged the survival of tumor-
bearing mice.

Summary and outlook

After more than 50 years of research, liposomes have developed targeted liposomes, long-
circulating liposomes and siRNA liposomes from the initial classic composition, and have been
combined by researchers to obtain co-loaded liposomes that are more suitable for clinical
application potential.
The liposome co-delivery system has many advantages, both to enhance toxicity, to
overcome multi-drug resistance, and to be used in tumor immunotherapy, but we should
also address problems that arise when applying liposome co-delivery systems. For example,
determine the proportion of drug contained to ensure that the drug ratio does not change
during the in vivo experiment to shows strong superiority of the liposome co-delivery system.

About author
Creative Biostructure is an innovative biotechnology company founded in 2005, which has
committed to the research and development of liposome technology in the past decade.