Abstract 1722: Nanoparticle pro-drug to overcome the stromal barrier in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the third-highest cause of cancer-related death in the United States. The heterogenicity of the PDAC is a major challenge in the success of anti-PDAC therapy. PDAC is comprised of >90 % dense desmoplastic tumor stroma that impedes the delivery of drugs into the core of the tumor, resulting development of drug resistance. Thus, we developed a nanoparticle pro-drug to overcome the stromal barrier of PDAC. We utilized nanoengineering to target dual CD44 and c-Met biomarkers that have a significant role in developing drug resistance on PDAC. Western blot analysis in various PDAC cell lines, such as PANC-1, AsPc-1, and BxPc3 revealed a high abundance of CD44 and cMet, strongly supporting our hypothesis. Therefore, targeting the CD44 and c-Met biomarker and selectively delivering anti-PDAC drug is a smart strategy to improve the anti-PDAC outcome. We developed dual CD44/c-Met targeted nanoparticle, called D44M that can efficiently penetrate the core of tumor as well as home into CD44 and cMet biomarker. We evaluated tumor selectivity of the near infrared (NIR) fluorescent dye conjugated D44M, D44M-NIR in the orthotopic PDAC model. The biodistribution of D44M-NIR in orthotopic animal model proved superior tumor penetration of D44M-NIR with 7-fold higher than the control NIR dye treatment. Moreover, D44M-NIR treated showed minimum liver accumulation, suggesting an outstanding approach of overcoming nanoparticle mediated liver toxicity. Finally, the D44M was chemically conjugated with gemcitabine (GEM), namely D44M-GEM pro-drug that showed excellent PDAC killing. The PDAC cell killing study of D44M-GEM in combination with Everolimus revealed high synergistic combination effect with CI value of 0.2-0.5. The anti-PDAC therapy in ASPC-1 xenograft model demonstrated significant tumor growth inhibition for treatment of D44M-GEM and D44M-GEM+Everolimus as compared to control. Supported with data, our work provides a perspective towards the implementation of nanotherapeutic to overcome the bottleneck barrier of therapeutic delivery and efficacy of PDAC management. Citation Format: Rami Alzhrani, Samaresh Sau, Amro Aboukameel, Hashem Alsaab, Asfar Azmi, Arun Iyer. Nanoparticle pro-drug to overcome the stromal barrier in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 1722.