Chemotherapeutic synergy enhancement through micellar nanotherapeutics

Current chemotherapeutic regimens involve the administration of a combination of agents with hopes of gaining synergistic cell-killing effects observed in vitro. However, drug synergy is rarely realized clinically given the different pharmacokinetic profiles of the drugs. Recent findings show that a combination of rapamycin and paclitaxel proves highly effective at hindering growth of tumors wherein the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway. Our objective was to fabricate a micellar nanotherapeutic platform capable of delivering a multitude of agents shown to synergistically affect a specific pathway (PI3K/Akt/mTOR) in breast cancer. We hypothesized that this concomitant delivery strategy will result in increased antitumor efficacy, given the site-specific and controlled delivery of the two agents. Herein, we demonstrate the successful fabrication of a nanotherepeutic strategy for the treatment of breast tumors with aberrant PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathways. Resulting polymer micelles were small in size (∼30 nm) and showed high levels of drug incorporation efficiency of both rapamycin and paclitaxel. Current studies involve the examination of release kinetics and antitumor efficacy in in vitro and in vivo models.