Viral Capsids Mimicking Based on pH-Sensitive Biodegradable Polymeric Micelles for Efficient Anticancer Drug Delivery

Bio-inspired supramolecular self-assembly have been widely explored in biomedical engineering, especially in the field of drug delivery. Here, viral capsid analogue pH-Sensitive polymeric micelles HA-Hyd-DOX were reported, where natural polysacarrides hyaluronic acid (HA) and anticancer drug doxorubicin (DOX), were linked through a hydrazone bond with a high drug loading content of 33.09 wt%. The polymeric micelles look like artificial virus capsids from "core–shell" structures. In addition, the polymeric backbone HA and hydrazone bonds were destroyed in the presence of hyaluronidase in cancer cells and under the acidic conditions of pH = 5 respectively, thereby prodrug-based polymeric micelles could penetrate into the tumor and DOX could be released in lysosomes to enhance anticancer efficacy. With the comparison of typical prodrug-based polymeric micelles mPEG-Hyd-DOX system where DOX was linked to methoxy poly(ethylene glycol) with a hydrazone bond linkage, HA-Hyd-DOX showed greater inhibition to cancer cells due to the better penetration. Such viral capsids mimicking polymeric micelles provided some remarkable benefits for drug delivery, including, high drug loading efficiency, controlled drug release and excellent biodegradable.