Abstract
Drug delivery to ischemic myocardium is an enormous challenge. This work aimed to characterize cardiac delivery behaviors of mono-polyethylene glycosylated (PEGylated) conjugates and long-circulating liposomes (L-Lps) with Radix Ophiopogonis polysaccharide (ROP) as drug. The results showed that compared to native ROP, 32-, 52-, and 45-fold increases in blood half-life were achieved by 20-kDa PEG mono-modified ROP (P20k-R), 40-kDa PEG mono-modified ROP (P40k-R), and ROP-loaded L-Lp, respectively. With comparable blood pharmacokinetics, ROP-loaded L-Lp showed both significantly higher targeting efficacy and drug exposure in infarcted myocardium than P40k-R. With regard to P20k-R, both its targeting efficacy and its level in infarcted myocardium at 3 hours postdose were comparable to P40k-R, but its level in blood and myocardium reduced obviously faster. As a whole, the results indicate that both loading in L-Lps and mono-PEGylation are effective in targeting drug to ischemic myocardium, but the former appears to induce stronger effects.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-13-0906), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81073065), the funds from Shanghai Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning (ZY3-CCCX-3-5001) and Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (15DZ2292000), the Science and Technology Development Fund of Pudong New Area (PKF-2013-003), and the “085” Project (085ZY1219) of Shanghai University of TCM.
Disclosure
The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.