UCLA Kills Cancer Cells With Light-Activated Nanoimpeller
Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a new light-activated nanomachine which can store anticancer drugs and release them into cancer cells.
Researchers from the California NanoSystems Institute and the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA created the tiny cargo-carrying nanoparticles as a mechanism to deliver targeted chemotherapy drugs or dyes inside living cancer cells, where they can then be released by photoactivation.
To make this controlled release possible, Jeffrey Zink and Fuyu Tamanoi, co-directors of UCLA’s Nano Machine Center for Targeted Delivery and On-Demand Release, coated molecule-sized pores with azobenzene and loaded them with anticancer drugs. Once these engineered nanoparticles had their cargo, they were given to human cancer cells in vitro in the dark.
After the nanoparticles, known as nanoimpellers, were taken up by the cancer cells, the drug delivery mechanism was remote-activated by exposing the particles to light.
Zink and Tamanoi’s team tested the nanoimpellers on a variety of malignant cells including human colon and pancreatic cancers and found they were successful in causing cell death. They believe the discovery has strong implications for the future of cancer treatment. As they explained,
“This system has potential applications for precise drug delivery and might be the next generation for novel platforms for the treatment of cancers such as colon and stomach cancer. The fact that one can operate the mechanism by remote control means that one can administer repeated small-dosage releases to achieve greater control of the drug’s effect.”
Fuyu Tamanoi, PhD and Jeffrey Zink, PhD
California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA
If you’d like to read more about the nanoimpeller, UCLA’s findings have been published in the March 31, 2008, advance online edition of the nanoscience journal Small.
Source: UCLA News
Related Links: CNSI; ScienceDaily; RSC
Related Podcast: Cancer Nanotechnology from CR
Technorati Tags: oncology; nanotechnology
Print This
|
|
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Browse All Categories: Next article: Kids with Kidney Cancer Get Good News from St Jude
Previous article: PerkinElmer Opens Product Research Center in Singapore
