A ‘more gentle’ treatment for cancer, involving microscopic beads, could eventually trick cancer cells into destruction, while leaving healthy cells undamaged, according to Danish researchers.
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, hope that getting cancer cells to absorb cytotoxins will pave the way for a new treatment.
Writing in Scientific Reports, physicist Murillo Martins at the Niels Bohr Institute describes how he used tiny magnetic beads to construct a nanoscale vehicle that could transport the cytotoxin directly to the cancer cells via the bloodstream. Placing a magnet at the tumour site enabled the beads to move to where they were needed.
He then designed a ring-shaped sac to encapsulate the cytotoxin surrounding the beads.
“The coupling does not always happen, but using a separation process we can sort the beads from where the coupling with the sac did not succeed," he says.
To get the package into the cell, he made a coating of calcium phosphate on the package with the cytotoxin and tested its efficacy successfully on breast cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer cells along with healthy cells (monocytes and fibroblasts) at the Laboratory of Tumour Immunology at the School of Bioscience in Botucatu, Brazil.
Heloisa Bordallo, associate professor in X-Ray and Neutron Science at the Niels Bohr Institute, said they could see that the nanoparticles with the cytotoxin were absorbed by the cancer cells.
“This caused the metabolism of the cancer cells to change and the cells showed signs that they were about to die,” she explained.
“The healthy cells, meanwhile, do not show any evidences of absorbing the packages with the cytotoxin. This suggests that the method can be used to send cytotoxin around the body with reduced toxicity and could therefore be potentially safer for healthy cells.”
Restricted mobility of specific functional groups reduces anti-cancer drug activity in healthy cells Scientific Reports 2 March 2016
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