A tumor-penetrating recombinant protein anti-EGFR-iRGD enhance efficacy of paclitaxel in 3D multicellular spheroids and gastric cancer in vivo

It has been a major challenge for drug penetration in solid tumor tissues because of the complicated tumor microenvironment. We have previously constructed a protein of bispecific targets and high permeability named anti-EGFR-iRGD and investigated its inhibiting cell proliferation of gastric cancer. Paclitaxel (PTX) is widely used for treating various kinds of cancer. In this paper, we investigated the effects of anti-EGFR-iRGD in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs including PTX in epidermal growth factor receptor highly expressing gastric cancer. We demonstrated the therapeutic efficacy of PTX combined with anti-EGFR-iRGD on monolayer cells (2D), multicellular spheroids (3D) and tumor-bearing mice for the first time and investigated the mechanism of this synergy effect. Our results provide impetus for further studies to use anti-EGFR-iRGD with standard cytotoxic treatment regimens for enhancing therapy of gastric cancer patients.