Conclusion
From our findings, we support that engineering crystalline drug delivery systems has implications in the treatment of cancer or other diseases where high enough constitutive drug levels are needed to maintain target saturation and inhibition while also preventing emergence of drug resistance, which is a consequence often seen with suboptimal dosing.
Methods
We chose to utilize the multi-tyrosine kinase inhibitor and multi-modal (anti-angiogenic and tumor cell cytotoxic) agent sorafenib, to combat aberrant angiogenesis and tumor growth which contribute to metastasis, ultimately responsible for poor patient outcomes. We tuned crystal size (surface area:volume ratios), imaged by SEM, to display controllability of drug delivery kinetics in in vitro drug release assays.
Results
Single and powder crystal X-ray diffraction (XRD) established that all crystals were the same polymorph and drug form. When utilized against an orthotopic triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) mouse model (4T1 in syngeneic BALB/c mice), we established anti-tumor activity from a single local, subcutaneous injection of crystalline sorafenib.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12195-021-00708-6.