Catherine Cailleau

Chemotherapy is primarily administered intravenously (IV), but this route poses significant challenges (e.g., high costs, patient discomfort, logistical difficulties, side effects such as infections from catheter use). Although oral and subcutaneous (SC) routes are preferred for their convenience and have the potential for better patient comfort and cost reduction, oral chemotherapy faces issues like poor bioavailability and adherence, while SC delivery is unsuitable for irritant or vesicant drugs due to local toxicity. To overcome these limitations, the polymer prodrug strategy has been explored, where drugs are linked to a polymer, reducing toxicity and enhancing drug delivery. Recent work has focused on creating water-soluble polymer prodrugs for SC delivery of paclitaxel (Ptx), a hydrophobic and vesicant drug, which was successfully conjugated to polyacrylamide (PAAm), a very hydrophilic biocompatible polymer, resulting in safer SC injection and enhanced therapeutic efficacy in tumor-bearing mice. However, this strategy's potential depends on adapting it to other vesicant anticancer drugs. Making the polymer degradable for facilitated excretion would also be a key improvement. In this work, this approach has been successfully extended to gemcitabine (Gem), a widely used but irritant anticancer drug, and to a degradable PAAm-based promoiety, having cleavable ester groups in the main chain. The resulting Gem-based prodrugs featured upper critical solution temperature to ensure complete solubility at the temperature of the SC tissue, sustained Gem release, significant degradation under physiological conditions, improved systemic toxicity and absence of local toxicity compared to free Gem. Remarkably, Gem-PAAm polymer prodrugs exhibited significant anticancer efficacy in mice bearing Mia Pa-Ca 2 tumors, outperforming Gemzar®, the commercial formulation of Gem. These advances suggest the potential of these hydrophilic polymer prodrugs to transform SC chemotherapy, enabling the use of a broader range of anticancer drugs while reducing side effects and improving patient outcomes.

This study evaluated the potential of isoCoQ-Carbazole, a diheterocyclic analog of isoCA-4, as an anti-tumor agent. To address its low aqueous solubility, liposomes were developed as a delivery system for the compound. In vitro experiments showed that loaded liposomes exhibited similar activity to the free form on multiple human tumor cell lines. In vivo experiments, using a palliative intratumoral injection chemotherapy approach, further demonstrated that isoCoQ-Carbazole loaded liposomes significantly reduced tumor growth in a CA-4-resistant HT29 cell model without causing any observable toxicity or weight loss in the treated mice. These findings suggest that liposomal isoCoQ-Carbazole may hold promise as a potential therapeutic agent for the treatment of inoperable, radiation-insensitive cancers.

Reperfusion injuries after a period of cardiac ischemia are known to lead to pathological modifications or even death. Among the different therapeutic options proposed, adenosine, a small molecule with platelet anti-aggregate and anti-inflammatory properties, has shown encouraging results in clinical trials. However, its clinical use is severely limited because of its very short half-life in the bloodstream. To overcome this limitation, we have proposed a strategy to encapsulate adenosine in squalene-based nanoparticles (NPs), a biocompatible and biodegradable lipid. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess, whether squalene-based nanoparticles loaded with adenosine (SQAd NPs) were cardioprotective in a preclinical cardiac ischemia/reperfusion model. Obtained SQAd NPs were characterized in depth and further evaluated in vitro. The NPs were formulated with a size of about 90 nm and remained stable up to 14 days at both 4 °C and room temperature. Moreover, these NPs did not show any signs of toxicity, neither on HL-1, H9c2 cardiac cell lines, nor on human PBMC and, further retained their inhibitory platelet aggregation properties. In a mouse model with experimental cardiac ischemia-reperfusion, treatment with SQAd NPs showed a reduction of the area at risk, as well as of the infarct area, although not statistically significant. However, we noted a significant reduction of apoptotic cells on cardiac tissue from animals treated with the NPs. Further studies would be interesting to understand how and through which mechanisms these nanoparticles act on cardiac cells.