A team of researchers in the U.S. have developed a nanoparticle with the ability to precisely deliver cancer-fighting drugs.
The new treatment uses molecular "smart bombs" to target a tumour's blood vessels and this stops tumours from metastasizing, or spreading through the body.
The "smart bombs" are loaded with anti-cancer drugs and use significantly lower doses of toxic chemotherapy, which results in less collateral damage to the surrounding tissue.
The team from the University of California, San Diego, say their "nanoparticle" drug delivery system has identified a way to target chemotherapy and say in trials with mice the smart bombs had a profound impact on metastasis in pancreatic and kidney cancers.
Dr. David Cheresh, who led the research, says the nanoparticle carrying a payload of chemotherapy targets a protein marker called integrin áíâ3, which is found on the surface of certain tumour blood vessels where it is associated with development of new blood vessels and malignant tumour growth.
Cheresh and his team found that while the nanoparticle/drug combo had little impact on primary tumours, it stopped pancreatic and kidney cancers from metastasizing throughout the bodies of mice.
They also showed that this effect was achieved with a far smaller dose of chemotherapy because the drug selectively targets the specific blood vessels that feed the cancerous lesion and kills the lesion without destroying surrounding tissue.
An unwanted side-effect of chemotherapy is the destruction of healthy tissue when it is administered systemically, which floods the body with cancer-killing toxins.
Dr. Cheresh says they were able to establish the desired anti-cancer effect by delivering the drug at levels 15 times below what is needed when the drug is used systemically and says it is interesting that the metastatic lesions were more sensitive to this therapy than the primary tumour.
The research was a collaborative endeavour linking researchers from UC San Diego's Health Sciences and the Jacobs School of Engineering, where engineers and oncologists worked together to design the nanoparticle.
The nanoparticle - a microscopic-sized particle of 100 nanometers - is made of various lipid-based polymers which delivers the cancer cell-killing drug doxorubicin to the network of blood vessels supporting the tumour that express the áíâ3 protein.