Gene therapy holds promise in the treatment of cancer as well as a large number of other diseases. However, developing a scalable system for delivering genes to cells both efficiently and safely has been challenging. Now, two teams of researchers have developed versatile nanotechnology-enabled platforms that could get therapeutic genes safely and efficiently into cancer cells.
In one study, a team of Northwestern University researchers has shown that nanodiamonds can serve as a novel gene delivery technology that combines key enhanced delivery efficiency along with outstanding biocompatibility, all in one drug delivery package. “Finding a more efficient and biocompatible method for gene delivery than is currently available is a major challenge in medicine,” said Dean Ho, Ph.D., who led the research. “By harnessing the innate advantages of nanodiamonds, we now have demonstrated their promise for gene therapy.”
Dr. Ho and his research team engineered surface-modified nanodiamond particles that successfully and efficiently delivered DNA into mammalian cells. The delivery efficiency was 70 times greater than that of a conventional standard for gene delivery. The results of these experiments were published in the journal ACS Nano. Dr. Ho and his research team originally demonstrated the application of nanodiamonds for chemotherapeutic delivery (click here for an earlier story).