In my previous post, I talked about how nanoparticles can deliver a payload of chemotherapy drugs in a targeted way, bypassing the anything other than cancer cells. Well, there’s another very interesting line of research involving nanoparticles.
Nanoparticles are small, but they’re still larger than most human cells. But they are the perfect size to infiltrate cancer cells, which are larger than nanoparticles. Researchers have begun experiments using the properties of the nanoparticles to destroy the cancer cells, without using chemotherapy drugs.
How does this work? You can read the full article here, but I’ll summarize for people who want the Cliff Notes…
Surgeons have to worry about leaving any cancer cells when they remove a tumor. But it’s not easy to know exactly if they got every last cell. So that’s why chemo and radiation are used, to kill anything remaining. The obvious drawback is the toll that these therapies take on normal tissue. So where do the nanoparticles come in?
Researchers in this particular experiment covered gold nanoparticles with immune protein antibodies that target squamous cell skin cancer tumors. So, the nanoparticles plus the antibodies congregated around those tumors and basically left the rest of the healthy tissue alone. Then, the researchers used ultrashort infrared pulses of light. The light targeted the clusters of nanoparticles, heating them up and killing the cancer cells that the particles were inside of. Also, the heat from the nanoparticles also vaporized water molecules that were nearby, creating what the researchers called “nanobubbles” that helped to rupture the cancer cells as well. As one of the researchers said, “nanoparticle clusters produce nanobubbles in cancer cells and not normal tissue.” That’s huge…
The researchers said that these nanobubbles made it possible to pick up sound from where tumor cells were located—and thereby detect the presence of as few as three cancer cells.
The results – 100% survival of the test cases where surgeons could remove most or all of the tumor; and when only partial surgical removal of a tumor was an option, the survival rate doubled. Again, these experiments were done on animal subjects, not humans. But the research is very promising. I’m looking forward to seeing human clinical trials and expand the options of treatment beyond the surgery, chemo, and radiation triad.