Elaborately engineering of a dual-drug co-assembled nanomedicine for boosting immunogenic cell death and enhancing triple negative breast cancer treatment

Pure drug-assembled nanosystem provides a facile and promising solution for simple manufacturing of nanodrugs, whereas a lack of understanding of the underlying assembly mechanism and the inefficient and uncontrollable drug release still limits the development and application of this technology. Here, a simple and practical nanoassembly of DOX and DiR is constructed on basis of their co-assembly characteristics. Multiple interaction forces are found to drive the co-assembly process. Moreover, DOX release from the nanoassembly can be well controlled by the acidic tumor microenvironment and laser irradiation, resulting in favorable delivery efficiency of DiR and DOX in vitro and in vivo. As expected, the nanoassembly with high therapeutic safety completely eradicated the mice triple negative breast cancer cells (4T1) on BALB/c mice, owing to synergistic chemo-photothermal therapy. More interestingly, DiR and DOX synergistically induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) of tumor cells after treatment, enabling the mice to acquire immune memory against tumor growth and recurrence. Such a facile nanoassembly technique provides a novel multimodal cancer treatment platform of chemotherapy/phototherapy/immunotherapy.