I am not sure I am getting your question right, but it seems to me you have highly hydrophobic (and probably water insoluble) drug, loaded in nano-particles, which are a sort of "water soluble".
In this case you can probably use your colloidal solution in most any standard in-vitro assays instead of the true solution. The only thing you need to consider is any possible effect of the carrier, i.e. the empty nano-particles. You may thus have to arrange your test in three arms, rather than the usual two, i.e. true blank (your solvent), carrier blank (empty nano-particles) and the test item (your nano-particles loaded with the drug candidate.
There a quite a few commercial drugs, which are administered as nano-particles loaded with the drug. Liposomal doxorubicin or protein particles bound paclitaxel are two simplest examples, but e.g. once the paclitaxel or docetaxel vials are diluted with parenteral infusion they also contain drug loaded in surfactant micelles (Cremophor for paclitaxel, Tween 80 for docetaxel).
Most important thing to keep in mind is mode of action of your drug, through which you can determine the downstream assays. If you don’t know the exact mechanism then you can use general assays. As regard to anticancer activity, you can use:
7-AAD or the cheaper MTT assay detect apoptosis and determine how potent your drug is.
You can also use Propidium Iodide (PI) to determine if it can induce cell cycle arrest.
the question us to know the concentration of the drug in the culture medium. On effect hydrophobicity is never absolute. Whatevet the vector of this drug it is essential to determine the critical micellar concentration of the drug and the architecture of the complex that it formes in solution. These parameters allow to determine the partition coefficient between the different phases that exist between the culture medium and the target of the drug. Sincerely. Christian