Rhamnolipid-coated W/O/W double emulsion nanoparticles for efficient delivery of doxorubicin/erlotinib and combination chemotherapy

BACKGROUND: Combination therapy using more than one drug can result in a synergetic effect in clinical treatment of cancer. For this, it is important to develop an efficient drug delivery system that can contain multiple drugs and provide high accumulation in tumor tissue. In particular, simultaneous and stable loading of drugs with different chemical properties into a single nanoparticle carrier is a difficult problem. RESULTS: We developed rhamnolipid-coated double emulsion nanoparticles containing doxorubicin and erlotinib (RL-NP-DOX-ERL) for efficient drug delivery to tumor tissue and combination chemotherapy. The double emulsion method enabled simultaneous loading of hydrophilic DOX and hydrophobic ERL in the NPs, and biosurfactant RL provided stable surface coating. The resulting NPs showed fast cellular uptake and synergetic tumor cell killing in SCC7 cells. In real-time imaging, they showed high accumulation in SCC7 tumor tissue in mice after intravenous injection. Furthermore, enhanced tumor suppression was observed by RL-NP-DOX-ERL in the same mouse model compared to control groups using free drugs and NPs containing a single drug. CONCLUSIONS: The developed RL-NP-DOX-ERL provided efficient delivery of DOX and ERL to tumor tissue and successful tumor therapy with a synergetic effect. Importantly, this study demonstrated the promising potential of double-emulsion NPs and RL coating for combination therapy. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT: [Image: see text] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12951-021-01160-4.