Nano weapons against cancer

Posted in technology

James Baker, a researcher and physician from the University of Michigan and his colleagues designed a new class of nanoparticles that can target and kill tumors which would be a good weapon in fighting cancer.

The nanoengineered system consists in gold nanoparticles with branching polymers that are called dendrimes. The dendrimer arms can contain multiple molecules that target cancer cells, and even drugs that can kill or slow down the cells evolution. Once plenty of nanoparticles gathered inside the cancer cells researchers can activate them by heating up with lasers of infrared light the gold nestled inside the dendrimers.

First for this technology to work on humans it has to work on animals but it faces many obstacles. To work on humans any nanotherapy for cancer must pass three challenges : nanoparticles should only target cancer cells, nanoparticles that don’t get accumulated in the cells should be eliminated from the body and the body’s immune response should not be triggered by the particles.

The first goal of targeting particles was very hard to achieve but it was made possible but transferring it from the lab into the body it’s a challenge. Mauro Ferrari, the chair of the biomedical-engineering department at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in Houston which studies this phenomenon says:” the most important problem to solve, is how to make nanoparticles that can stealthily avoid the body’s natural defense mechanisms and get to tumors and that the body has so many booby traps that keep drugs and nanoparticles and everything that is foreign [from getting] into anything of significance in the body so if you can build on top of the dendrimer platform the ability to make it across biological barriers with great efficiency, then we have a great breakthrough.”

In my opinion this technology is one step from a breakthrough in modern bio-technology and if the scientist will manage to resolve all the problems in the near future we will be able to fight against cancer in a less painful way than drugs and chemotherapy.

Nano weapon: A gold nanoparticle enveloped in treelike polymer branches could act as a multipurpose tool for fighting cancer. Researchers can attach folic acid (pink) and fluorescent dye (green) to the nanoparticle to target and image tumors. Tumor cells could be killed with cancer drugs, which are attached to the particle, and with lasers that heat up the gold.
Credit: Xiangyang Shi, University of Michigan