Abstract
Purpose:
Intravitreal drugs injection is an effective therapy for many posterior segment ocular disorders. However, the short half-lives of the drugs require repeated injections to maintain their therapeutic effect. In ARVO 2014, we showed that in vitro a self-assembling peptide gel could be used as a potential controlled release drug carrier. However, we did not evaluate the efficacy of bevacizumab encapsulated in the carrier. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of the growth inhibitory of HUVEC cells.
Methods:
100μl (1.25mg) of bevacizumab was mixed with 200μl of the self-assembling peptide gel (final concentration of gel; 0.1%). The gel-mixtures were incubated for 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks at 37℃. After incubation, 300μl of distilled water was added to the mixtures. 200μl of this mixture, bevacizumab without the gel (positive control) or distilled water (negative control) was added to 1.8ml of the medium including rhVEGF. This was then incubated at 37℃for 4 hours. The media was replaced with the supernatant of HUVEC cells seeded before 24 hours. After incubation for 3 days, alamarblue was added to each well and the plate was incubated for additional 3 hours. Then the medium was collected and fluorescence intensity was measured.
Results:
The ration of fluorescence intensities of the medium including the gel-mixtures incubated for 1, 2, 3 and 4 week and positive contorol to negative control were 32.6, 46.9, 51.7, 51.7, 48.8 and 57.5 %. There was no difference between the ration of samples and positive control (p>0.05).
Conclusions:
The bevacizumab encapsulated in the self-assembling peptide gel even showed the growth inhibitory effect of HUVEC cells.