NU researchers work to pinpoint chemotherapy delivery
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By Raychelle Burks/For the Lincoln Journal Star
In the war on cancer, the newest soldiers are smaller than the tip of a needle and “smarter” than the average anticancer drug.
A new anticancer drug-delivery system engineered by two University of Nebraska scientists may advance chemotherapy research and reduce the side effects of chemotherapy.
The new system — still being studied — improves upon earlier efforts to use magnetism to deliver anticancer drugs to a cancer site.
Conventional chemotherapy can impart on the cancer patient a variety of negative side effects.
“A major problem with chemotherapy drugs is that they travel throughout the entire body and often aren’t very discriminating about what types of cells they kill,” said Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, associate professor of physics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “This is why chemotherapy is so debilitating.”
Anticancer drugs are typically introduced into the bloodstream where their route is determined not by the doctor, but by the body.
“You put them in the body and blood flow is in control,” said Leslie-Pelecky.
Anticancer drugs in the bloodstream may travel a long and convoluted path through many organs, tissues and cells before reaching the cancer site. The drugs can damage or kill healthy cells, inflicting “collateral damage” in the cancer war.
Leslie-Pelecky and Dr. Vinod Labhasetwar of the University of Nebraska Medical Center seek to eliminate this damage by using magnetism to make anticancer-drug transportation “smarter.” Magnetism may significantly shorten the meandering path of toxic anticancer drugs in the body.
The process begins in Leslie-Pelecky’s laboratory with the construction of magnetic iron-oxide particles nearly a billionth of a meter (nanometer) in size.
The iron-oxide is surrounded by a drug-binding layer and a polymer shell that enables the particles to be dispersed in the blood. A tiny magnet placed at the cancer site attracts the iron oxide in the nanoparticles, so the toxic drugs make a bee line for the tumor, minimizing their exposure to healthy cells.
“Magnetism gives you a way to tell the particles where to go,” said Leslie-Pelecky.
The drug-binding layer also serves as a “bodyguard” for the particles, hiding them from the body’s system for removing foreign invaders from the bloodstream.
Undetected, these nanosoldiers — 1,000 times smaller than a single red blood cell — can get to the cancer site and stay there longer, exposing the cancer to lethal drugs for longer periods. Such sustained exposure is required to kill cancer cells.
The innovative design of the researchers’ system, recently featured by the National Cancer Institute in its publication “Nanotech News” and in an article published in the journal “Molecular Pharmaceutics,” aims to bring the full power of nanotechnology to cancer research.
Leslie-Pelecky said this drug-delivery system “could decrease greatly the negative side effects (of chemotherapy) and allow a lower concentration of drugs to be used with higher efficacy.”
The technique, which Leslie-Pelecky said is intended for “solid cancers,” has been tested on cultured cells from breast and prostate cancers in this joint UNL-UNMC project. These cancers have been extensively studied Labhasetwar’s laboratory, making them well-known enemies.
“The therapeutic outcome with targeted drug delivery using magnetic nanoparticles could be much better because the currently used drugs — paclitaxel and doxorubin — are very toxic,” he said.
The Nebraska Research Initiative provided initial funding for this joint UNL-UNMC project.
Labhasetwar’s laboratory will soon begin research using the nanoparticle drug-delivery system in mice. Success in treating cancer in mice may see the system deployed to its next battle — fighting cancer in humans.
“Since we received funding from the National Institutes of Health to continue this work, we can make quick progress in this direction,” said Labhasetwar. “If everything goes well, as per our expectations, the human studies can be planned in the next four to five years.”
About the author: Raychelle Burks is a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. To write this story, Burks received support from a National Science Foundation grant to the UNL Department of Physics. She can be reached at rmburks@hotmail.com.
More information
For more information on this work and other applications of nanotechnology to medicine, visit the Web sites of Dr. Leslie-Pelecky, http://physics.unl.edu/%7Ediandra/DLP_Group_Website/diandra.htm and Dr. Vinod Labhasetwar, www.unmc.edu/pharmacy/labhasetwar
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