Peptide-Decorated Ultrasmall Superparamagnetic Nanoparticles as Active Targeting MRI Contrast Agents for Ovarian Tumors

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely applied in medical research and diagnosis, and MRI contrast medium plays a crucial role in improving the sensitivity of detection. Ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxides (USPIOs) exhibit the potential as a T2 enhancement contrast medium for MRI due to their excellent magnetic response performance, however, to endow it with specific tumor targetability while ensuring low cytotoxicity and long-term circulation performance has always been a hot topic in this field. In this study, a well-designed procedure of chemical coprecipitation, surface modification and peptide grafting was applied to synthesize the active tumor targeting [email protected], in which Pluronic F127 (F127) and the peptide WSGPGVWGASVK (peptide-WSG) were selected as the template agent and the ovarian tumor targeting ligand respectively. The results showed that single [email protected] particles were Fe3O4 nanoparticles regulated by confinement effect of F127 micelles with uniform globular morphology and size (~9 nm), and peptide-WSG was grafted for tumor targetability. They presented superparamagnetic behavior with high T2 relaxivity (r2 = 278.15 mM−1s−1), and in vitro targetability for SKOV-3 cells due to the special binding between peptide-WSG and specific receptors of SKOV-3. The test results in vivo verified the targetability of [email protected] by their specific aggregation in the tumor regions, leading to the T2-weighted MRI contrast enhancement. Based on these outstanding properties, [email protected] have great potential to be applied as the active tumor targeting contrast agent for MRI.
Funding Information
  • Education Department of Sichuan Province (15ZB0209)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (51372157)
  • Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2017JY0255)
  • Zigong City (2016XC11)

This publication has 45 references indexed in Scilit: