The promotion of human malignant melanoma growth by mesoporous silica nanoparticles through decreased reactive oxygen species

The concept that mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) are regarded as ideal novel drug delivery carriers in tumor therapy has been introduced extensively, but the effects of MSNs on tumor growth have received little attention. Here a model of nude mice xenografted with human malignant melanoma cells (A375) was used to investigate the effect of MSNs on tumor growth. Surprisingly, we found that MSNs have no toxicity to human malignant melanoma but increasing tumor growth in vivo. It was also confirmed that MSNs significantly promoted A375 cell proliferation and accelerated cell cycle progression in vitro. Cellular uptake mechanism showed that MSNs may affect molecular behavior of A375 cells when they entered into cytoplasm. Then, a detailed mechanism indicated that the promotion effect induced by MSNs was due to the decreasing of endogenous reactive oxygen species (ROS) in cells. Further results demonstrated that the upregulation of anti-apoptotic molecules Bcl-2 expression and the inhibition of NF-κB activation by MSNs may promote cell proliferation in a redox-sensitive signal pathway. These results show that tumor growth can be regulated by nanocarriers themselves in a ROS-dependent manner and imply that nanocarriers are not necessarily suitable for all kinds of tumor therapy in development drug delivery system.