Role of bacterial minicells in cancer therapy / 生物工程学报

Cancer is one of the most important diseases threatening human health. Frequently-used traditional cancer treatment methods, like radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery, have serious toxic side effects and limitations. The widely-used drug delivery carriers (liposomes, nanoparticles, etc.) have also possessed many issues such as drug leakage and incomplete loading in the late clinical stage. Currently, using tumor-targeting vectors to deliver anti-tumor drugs or small molecules is one of the promising strategies for mediating safe and effective tumor therapy. In recent years, bacterial-derived non-replicating minicells, which are nanoscale non-nucleated cells produced during abnormal bacterial division, have got more and more attention. With a diameter of 200-400 nm, minicells have a large drug loading capacity. Meanwhile, the surface of minicells are able to be modified to load the assembly of antibodies/ligands that bind to tumor cell surface specific antigens or receptors, which can significantly improve tumor targeting of minicells. This tumor-targeting nanomaterials of minicells not only are used to deliver anti-tumor chemotherapeutic drugs, functional nucleic acids or plasmids encoding functional small molecules to mammalian cells, but also greatly increase drug loading and reduce drug penetration. Thus, the use of minicells combining with chemical therapy could help reduce the toxicity and maximize the effectiveness of the drug in the body. This paper summarizes the research and development of production purification, drug loading, tumor cells targeting, and internalization process of minicells, as well as its use in the delivery of anti-tumor drugs, to provide some information for the development and utilization of minicell carriers.

Study on Minicell Generation of Lactobacillus acidophilus VTCC-B-871 for Drug Delivery.

The practice of developing molecularly targeted drugs to achieve a higher degree of cancer therapy and antibiotic resistance is indispensable. Recently, bacterially derived 400nm sized minicells was reported on the ability of encapsulation with chemotherapeutic drugs. Lactobacillus acidophilus strain participated in the anti-cancer effects and performed the high-level specificity for cancer cell lines. Here we discuss minicells generation of Lactobacillus acidophilus VTCC-B-871 for drug delivery. The present work was the first report on that L. acidophilus VTCC-B-871 formed minicells with highly significant ratio (25 %) in modified MRS broth with fructose 10 g/l carbon source concentration. The minicells were packaged with Paclitaxel (10 μg/ml) and Cephalosporin (10 μg/ml) at different times of incubation (10, 15, 24 hours) at 37°C. As a result, minicells could completely absorbed in 10 hours by detecting the extraction after drug packaged minicells on antimicrobial activities on S. aureus ATCC 25923, E. coli ATCC 9637, Salmonella typhi ATCC 19430, C. albicans ATCC 14053, P . aeruginosa ATCC 27853.