Data demonstrating the in vivo anti-tumor efficacy of thermosensitive liposome formulations of a drug combination in pre-clinical models of breast cancer

Thermosensitive liposomes in combination with localized mild hyperthermia can improve the delivery of drug to solid tumor sites. For this reason, thermosensitive liposome formulations of a range of chemotherapy drugs have been designed. Our group previously developed and characterized a thermosensitive liposome formulation of the heat shock protein 90 inhibitor alvespimycin as a companion therapeutic to a thermosensitive liposome formulation equivalent in composition to ThermoDox (i.e., ThermoDXR), with the goal of increasing the therapeutic index of doxorubicin as the combination was revealed to be highly synergistic in a panel of human breast cancer cell lines including MDA-MB-231 (Dunne et al., 2019). The data presented here further describes the effect of the doxorubicin (DXR) and alvespimycin (ALV) combination in vitro and in vivo. Specifically, the combination effect in mouse breast cancer 4T1 cells and the in vivo efficacy of this heat-activated chemotherapy combination in both immunocompromised (MDA-MB-231 tumor bearing female SCID mice) and immunocompetent (4T1 tumor bearing female BALB/c mice) models of breast cancer.