Anti-Cancer Drug Delivery Modeling in Nanomedicine with Combinatorial
Image Analysis and Non-Linear Regression
Abstract
Purpose: The field of cancer nanomedicine has made significant progress,
but its clinical translation is impeded by many challenges, such as the
difficulty in analysing intracellular anticancer drug release by the
nanocarriers due to the lack of suitable tools. Here, we propose the
development of a combinatorial imaging and analysis technique to
evaluate anticancer drug such as doxorubicin HCl (DOX) released by a
nanocarrier inside the HCT116 colon cancer cells and its subsequent
intracellular accumulation. Procedure: Fluorescent cell images were
captured and subjected to combined image analysis and machine learning
based procedures to assess and quantify the delivery and retention rate
of DOX inside the cancer cells by multifunctional
CNT-DOX-Fe3O4nanocarrier. Results: We show that DOX in HCT116 cells was
higher for multifunctional CNT-DOX-Fe3O4nanocarrierthan free DOX,
indicating efficient and steady release of DOX as well as superior
retentive property of the nanocarrier. Initially (1 h and 4 h) the
luminance intensity of DOX in the cell cytoplasm delivered by
CNT-DOX-Fe3O4nanocarrier was ~0.34 times and
~0.42 times lesser than that of free DOX delivered
normally. However, at 24 h and 48 h post treatment the luminance
intensity of DOX for CNT-DOX-Fe3O4nanocarrier was ~1.98
times and 1.92 times higher than that of free DOX. Furthermore, the
luminance intensity of DOX for CNT-DOX-Fe3O4in the whole cell was
~1.35 times and ~1.62 times higher than
that of free DOX at 24h and 48 h, respectively. Conclusions: The
high-throughput nature of our image analysis workflow allowed us to
automate the process of DOX retention analysis, and enabled us to devise
machine learning-based modeling to predict the percentage of anticancer
drug retention in cells. The development of models to automatically
quantify and predict intra-cellular drug release in cancer cells could
benefit personalized treatments by optimizing the design of
nanocarriers.