Professor Wuli Yang and Professor Xin Chen in Fudan University published a new paper entitled “Doxorubicin-loaded Magnetic Silk Fibroin Nanoparticles for Targeted Therapy of Multidrug-Resistant Cancer” in Advanced Materials.

In the paper, they present a one-step strategy to prepare doxorubicin-loaded magnetic silk fibroin (SF) nanoparticles through salting out SF protein in the presence of doxorubicin and specific amounts of hydrophilic Fe3O4 nanoparticles. The introduction of Fe3O4 nanoparticles provides SF nanoparticles magntic tumor targeting ability. The magnetic guided drug delivery in a humanized orthotropic breast cancer model and chemotherapy performance of drug-resistant cancer are studied in the present contribution to illustrate their abilities to serve as a drug delivery system in vivo. The magnetic targeting broadens the range of biomedical applications of SF and the nanoparticle-assisted SF nanoparticles preparation strategy could be extremely useful for the advancement of other biomacromolecule-based materials.