Drug-drug self-delivery systems, as advanced synergistic therapy strategies, have greatly overcome the limitations of traditional single-drug chemotherapy. However, conventional covalent drug-drug self-delivery systems, mostly employing a single covalent bond conjugation strategy, result in a rapid release of drugs at a certain time, leading to insufficient and non-durable therapeutic effects on living tissues. Recently, the research group has developed a novel supramolecular drug-drug complex (SDDC) that simultaneously incorporates covalent and non-covalent interactions to achieve sequential drug release within tumor cells. The SDDC further self-assembles into uniform bilayered supramolecular vesicles (SVs) in water, demonstrating high drug loading capacity and stable drug transportation capability. In biological experiments, compared to individual free drugs or a mixture of two free drugs, SVs exhibit programmable drug release within tumor cells and demonstrate outstanding synergistic effects, significantly improving treatment efficiency. Therefore, this study combines the advantages of dynamic reversible non-covalent interactions and stable covalent bonds, opening up new avenues for cancer therapy.

The relevant research findings have been published online in "ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces" (2020, DOI: 10.1002/chem.201705162).

(Paper Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsami.0c04565). The research group''s doctoral

student, Chengfei Liu, and Dr. Chunpu Li from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica are the co-first authors of the paper, while Prof. Wei Tian, Dr. Hong Liu from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, and Prof. Li Fan from Air Force Medical University are the corresponding authors.