Targeting Prostate and Other Cancers Most Effectively

While chemotherapy is the most effective treatment for many types of cancer, researchers continue to search for an optimum method of delivery that will neither harm healthy cells nor cause patients a host of debilitating side effects.

The nanotechnology research team at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, led by Dr. Omid Farokhzad, has developed a drug delivery platform that offers a powerful new solution for getting chemotherapy drugs into prostate cancer cells efficiently and accurately. Working with researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they created a technique that is not only capable of specifically targeting cancerous prostate cells and discharging the beneficial drugs directly into them but is also able to distinguish between malignant cells and healthy ones.

They liken their system to equipping a car with the finest features, adding a passenger (the drugs), and sending it automatically to its destination (the cancer cells). The ability to choose molecules or "ligands" that will be "smart" enough to bind only to prostate cancer cells and be successfully engulfed by them represents a significant breakthrough. Most encouraging, the ligands can be made to interact with any desired type of cancer cells, offering important potential for combating many varieties of the disease.

In a related study, Dr. Dan Peer and Prof. Rimona Margalit of Tel Aviv University compare their own delivery platform to a "cluster bomb" packed with tiny particles of chemotherapy drugs that seeks out cancerous cells, releases its payload, then decomposes in the body, making treatment both more potent and less arduous. This team is working with a company in California to fast track the transition of their system into clinical trials, hopefully, within two years.

 

References:
Materials provided by Brigham and Women's Hospital.

 

Journal reference: Zeyu Xiao, Etgar Levy-Nissenbaum, Frank Alexis, Andrej Lupták, Benjamin A. Teply, Juliana M. Chan, Jinjun Shi, Elise Digga, Judy Cheng, Robert Langer, Omid C. Farokhzad. Engineering of Targeted Nanoparticles for Cancer Therapy Using Internalizing Aptamers Isolated by Cell-Uptake Selection. ACS Nano, 2012; : 120103130305002 DOI: 10.1021/nn204165v

Dr. Dan Peer and Prof.Rimona Margalit, Tel Aviv University.