Ginger-Derived Doxorubicin-Loaded Nanovectors as Drug Delivery for Cancer Therapy

A novel type of nanoparticle drug transport system based on lipids isolated from ginger was used to deliver the toxic chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin (Dox) to colon cancer cells with minimal damage to normal tissues.

Although in use for more than 40 years as a primary chemotherapy drug, Dox is known to cause serious heart problems. To prevent these, doctors may limit the amount of Dox given to each patient so that the total amount a patient receives over her or his entire lifetime is 550 milligrams per square meter, or less. Furthermore, the necessity to stop treatment to protect the patient from heart disease may diminish the usefulness of Dox in treating cancer.


In a new approach to safely deliver Dox to colon tumors, investigators at Georgia State University (Atlanta, USA) created nanoparticles from ginger and reassembled their lipids into ginger-derived nanovectors (GDNVs). These nanovectors were capable of loading Dox with high efficiency and showed a better pH-dependent drug-release profile than commercially available liposomal-Dox. GDNVs were shown to be taken up efficiently by colon cancer cells.

The GDNVs were modified by conjugating them with the targeting ligand folic acid (FA-GDNVs), which directed the Dox-loaded nanovectors specifically to Colon-26 tumors in vivo. Results published in the August 5, 2016, online edition of the journal Molecular Therapy showed treatment with the modified nanovectors enhanced the chemotherapeutic inhibition of tumor growth compared with the free drug.

“Our results show that FA nanovectors made of edible ginger-derived lipids could shift the current paradigm of drug delivery away from artificially synthesized nanoparticles toward the use of nature-derived nanovectors from edible plants,” said senior author Dr. Didier Merlin, professor of biomedical sciences at Georgia State University. “Because they are nontoxic and can be produced on a large scale, FA nanovectors derived from edible plants could represent one of the safest targeted therapeutic delivery platforms.”

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