Nano-balls filled with poison wipe out metastatic cancer in mice | The Compost Bin | Forums

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For most cancer patients, it’s not the original tumor that poses the greatest risk. It’s the metastases that invade the lung, liver, and other tissues. Now, researchers have come up with an approach that tricks these spinoff tumors into swallowing poison. So far the strategy has only been tested in mice, where it proved highly effective. But the results are promising enough that the researchers are planning to launch clinical trials in cancer patients within a year.

The new work is “very innovative stuff,” says Steven Libutti, a geneticist and cancer surgeon at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, who was not involved in the study. The treatment, he explains, works in three steps to place a conventional chemotherapeutic agent near the nucleus (or nuclei) of a metastatic cancer cell where the drug molecules are most lethal. “It’s almost like a multistage rocket” that lifts astronauts off Earth, sends them to the moon, and returns them safely, he says.

At the heart of the new therapy is a chemotherapeutic agent called doxorubicin (dox). The drug has been a mainstay of cancer treatment for years, as it jams up DNA in the cell nucleus and prevents tumor cells from dividing. But when it’s injected into the bloodstream, the drug can also kill heart muscle cells and cause heart failure, which often forces oncologists to either dial back the dose or discontinue it altogether. Delivering dox only to tumor cells is therefore highly desirable, but it has been a major challenge.

Hoping to provide such cell specificity, researchers led by Mauro Ferrari, a nanomedicine expert, as well as president and CEO of the Houston Methodist Research Institute in Texas, have spent years developing porous silicon particles as drug carriers. The particles’ micrometer-scale size and disklike shape allows them travel unimpeded through normal blood vessels. But when they hit blood vessels around tumors, which are typically malformed and leaky, the particles fall out of the circulation and pool near the tumor. That was step one in delivering chemotherapeutic drugs to their target. But just filling such particles with dox doesn’t do much good, Ferrari says. Even if a small amount of the drug finds its way inside tumor cells, those cells often have membrane proteins that act as tiny pumps to push the drug back outside the cell before it can do any damage.

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