Cancer cells have different ways of surviving in our body despite all our efforts into subduing, neutralizing, and eventually eliminating them. So we also have to find crafty ways to get rid of them. One such method that a team from McCormick School of Engineering used is to disguise chemo drugs as fat.
“It’s like a Trojan horse,” Nathan Gianneschi, a professor of chemistry and of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and associate director of the International Institute of Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. “It looks like a nice little fatty acid, so the tumor’s receptors see it and invite it in. Then the drug starts getting metabolized and kills the tumor cells.”
One other advantage to this method is that it reduces the risk of side effects from the drug since it targets or is consumed by the cancer cells directly. They tested the drug delivery system by using a common chemo drug and introducing it into a small animal model with tumors.
Disguised as fat, the drug entered and completely eliminated the tumors in three types of cancer: bone, pancreatic, and colon. Even better: the researchers found they could deliver 20 times the dose of paclitaxel with their system, compared to two other paclitaxel-based drugs. But even at such a high quantity, the drug in Gianneschi’s system was still 17 times safer.
(Image credit: Brian/Flickr)