Development of anticancer drug delivery system based on bone marrow-derived multipotent mesenchymal stem cells

Nowadays, a number of anticancer drugs are inadmissible due to their high toxicity. However, this matter can be addressed with improvements in pharmacokinetics, which would allow to generate localized high concentrations of antitumor drugs with minimal systemic toxicity. Such an effect can be achieved by utilizing high encapsulating properties of polyelectrolyte microcapsules with further modification of therapeutically relevant cells capable of pathotropism with these microcarriers. In the present work we studied the effect of drug carrier size on the migration properties of the human multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells (MMSCs). The conducted study included experiments on internalization efficiency, overall toxicity, migration index and speed in order to optimize the properties of the resulting cell-based drug delivery system. In addition to that the ability to directed migration of modified MMSCs along the gradient of tumor-associated chemokines (SDF-1) was explored using chemotaxis slides and 3D tumor tissue model. The results demonstrated that the combination of MMSCs and drug-loaded microcapsules resulted in a delivery system which possesses the ability to actively migrate into tumors, was not toxic towards cell carriers and overall had a therapeutic potential.