Supramolecular Chemotherapy: Cooperative Enhancement of Antitumor Activity by Combining Controlled Release of Oxaliplatin and Consuming of Spermine by Cucurbit[7]uril

Supramolecular chemotherapy is aimed to employ supramolecular approach for regulating the cytotoxicity and improving the efficiency of antitumor drugs. In this paper, we demonstrated a new example of supramolecular chemotherapy by utilizing the clinical antitumor drug, oxaliplatin, which is the specific drug for colorectal cancer treatment. Cytotoxicity of oxaliplatin to the colorectal normal cell could be significantly decreased by host-guest complexation between oxaliplatin and cucurbit[7]uril (CB[7]). More importantly, oxaliplatin-CB[7] exhibited cooperatively enhanced antitumor activity than oxaliplatin itself. On the one hand, the antitumor activity of oxaliplatin can reappear by competitive replacement of spermine from oxaliplatin-CB[7]; on the other hand, CB[7] can consume the overexpressed spermine in tumor environments, which is essential for tumor cell growth. These two events can lead to the cooperatively enhanced antitumor performance. Supramolecular chemotherapy can be applied to treat with spermine-overexpressed tumors. It is highly anticipated that this strategy may be employed in many other clinical antitumor drugs, which opens a new horizon of supramolecular chemotherapy for potential applications in clinical antitumor treatments.