BMH,The Hydrogel for cancer photothermal chemotherapy

Hydrogel is a three-dimensional cross-linked hydrophilic polymer material with good biocompatibility and sensitive stimulus response. In recent decades, it has received extensive attention from scientists, engineers and business people. At present, hydrogels have been widely used in high-tech fields such as super absorbent materials, food industry, wound dressings, contact lenses, drug slow-release matrices, chemical valves, and human soft tissue filling.

 Recently, researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University have developed  an injectable redox and light responsive bio-inspired MnO₂ hybrid (BMH) hydrogel for effective melanoma photothermo-chemotherapy and MDR bacteria infected-wound healing.

Melanoma is a malignant tumor with early metastasis and high fatality rate, which accounts for 80% of skin cancers. Because the early symptoms of melanoma are not obvious, most patients are already in the middle and late stages when they are discovered. They are not sensitive to radiotherapy and mainly rely on chemotherapy. However, their sensitivity to chemotherapy drugs is poor and resistance to resistance is the bottleneck of current melanoma treatment. At present, the treatment of melanoma needs to be carried out through the development of new drugs to suppress tumors or the research of drug resistance mechanisms.

The BMH hydrogel was ingeniously fabricated via non-covalent self-assembly and MnO2 nanosheets mediated covalent oxidative polymerization of the catechol functionalized chitosan for the first time. The BMH hydrogel displayed excellent shear-thinning, injectable, adhesive, redox/light responsive and contact-active antibacterial capabilities. Remarkably, BMH hydrogel could alleviate the hypoxic tumor microenvironment (TME) by decomposing the endogenous H2O2 into O2, and simultaneously release anticancer drug DOX. Increasing the local availability of O2 enhanced the cytotoxicity of DOX against melanoma in a highly site-specific manner. By further combining with a spatiotemporal controllable photothermal hyperthermia, researchers demonstrated a near-complete tumor suppression both in vitro (98.6%) and large solid tumors in vivo (96.2%). Moreover, BMH hydrogel could significantly promote the MDR-infected wound healing in vivo by efficiently eradicating bacterial invasion and perpetually ameliorating the oxidative and inflammatory wound microenvironment. Collectively, BMH hydrogel indicated great therapeutic potentials for both cancer therapy and tissue engineering.

References: Shenqiang Wang, Hua Zheng,Li Zhou, Fang Cheng.et al. Injectable redox and light responsive MnO2 hybrid hydrogel for simultaneous melanoma therapy and multidrug-resistant bacteria-infected wound healing. Biomaterials. 2020.doc:science/article/ pii/S0142961220305603