In a study of mice, MIT chemists demonstrated that their multidrug nanoparticle shrank tumors much more than when drugs were given at the same ratio but untethered to a particle. Their nanoparticle platform could potentially be deployed to deliver drug combinations against a variety of cancers.

Their findings are published in Nature Nanotechnology in an article titled, “Molecular bottlebrush prodrugs as mono- and triplex combination therapies for multiple myeloma.”

“Cancer therapies often have narrow therapeutic indexes and involve potentially suboptimal combinations due to the dissimilar physical properties of drug molecules,” wrote the researchers. “Nanomedicine platforms could address these challenges, but it remains unclear whether synergistic free-drug ratios translate to nanocarriers and whether nanocarriers with multiple drugs outperform mixtures of single-drug nanocarriers at the same dose. Here we report a bottlebrush prodrug (BPD) platform designed to answer these questions in the context of multiple myeloma therapy.”

“There’s a lot of interest in finding synergistic combination therapies for cancer, meaning that they leverage some underlying mechanism of the cancer cell that allows them to kill more effectively, but oftentimes we don’t know what that right ratio will be,” explained Jeremiah Johnson, PhD, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the study.

For several years, Johnson’s lab has been working on polymer nanoparticles designed to carry multiple drugs. In the new study, he and his team focused on a bottlebrush-shaped particle.

“If we want to make a bottlebrush that has two drugs or three drugs or any number of drugs in it, we simply need to synthesize those different drug-conjugated monomers, mix them together, and polymerize them. The resulting bottlebrushes have exactly the same size and shape as the bottlebrush that only has one drug, but now they have a distribution of two, three, or however many drugs you want within them,” Johnson said.

The researchers first tested particles carrying just one drug: bortezomib, which is used to treat multiple myeloma, a cancer that affects a type of B cells known as plasma cells. Bortezomib is a proteasome inhibitor, a type of drug that prevents cancer cells from breaking down the excess proteins they produce.

On its own, bortezomib tends to accumulate in red blood cells, which have high proteasome concentrations. However, when the researchers gave their bottlebrush prodrug version of the drug to mice, they found that the particles accumulated primarily in plasma cells because the bottlebrush structure protects the drug from being released right away, allowing it to circulate long enough to reach its target.

“If you inject three drugs into the body, the likelihood that the correct ratio of those drugs will arrive at the cancer cell at the same time can be very low. The drugs have different properties that cause them to go to different places, and that hinders the translation of these identified synergistic drug ratios quite immensely,” Johnson said.

In tests in two mouse models of multiple myeloma, the researchers observed that three-drug bottlebrushes with a synergistic ratio significantly inhibited tumor growth compared to the free drugs given at the same ratio and to mixtures of three different single-drug bottlebrushes.

“We were happy to see that the bortezomib bottlebrush prodrug on its own was an excellent drug, displaying improved efficacy and safety compared to bortezomib, and that has led us to pursue trying to bring this molecule to the clinic as a next-generation proteasome inhibitor,” Johnson said. “It has completely different properties than bortezomib and gives you the ability to have a wider therapeutic index to treat cancers that bortezomib has not been used in before.”

Johnson’s lab is also working on using these particles to deliver therapeutic antibodies along with drugs, as well as combining them with larger particles that could deliver messenger RNA along with drug molecules. “The versatility of this platform gives us endless opportunities to create new combinations,” he added.