Abstract
Nano-sized drug carriers are capable of improving the transportation efficiency of anticancer drugs as well as reducing the therapeutic side effects. However, the efficacies of these newly developed candidates are so far assessed usually by observing the tumor volumes and the survival rate of treated animals, and their totally accumulated amounts in the whole tumor tissues. To overcome these limitations, we have constructed two novel analytical systems for online continuous monitoring of tumor extracellular gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), lactate, and glucose in living mice by means of (i) combining push–pull perfusion (PPP) sampling, open-tubular fractionation scheme with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, and (ii) hyphenating microdialysis sampling, sequentially enzymatic derivatization with online fluorescence spectrometer. After method’s optimization and validation, our acquired dynamic profiles not only indicated that the pegylated AuNPs had greater tendency toward extravasating into the tumor extracellular space but also revealed that our system possessed the ability to online sequentially determine the concentrations of the tumor extracellular H2O2, lactate, and glucose. Through combining these two online analytical systems, we believe that our integrated analytical platform can provide the new perspectives for in vivo studying the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of nano-sized drug carriers in future cancer diagnosis and therapeutic applications.