Nanoparticles For Cancer Detection And Treatment
cancer cell
Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. Nanotechnology offers the means to aim therapies directly and selectively at cancerous cells.
Chemotherapy employs drugs that are known to kill cancer cells effectively. But these drugs kill healthy cells in addition to tumor cells, leading to adverse side effects such as hair-loss, nausea, neuropathy, fatigue, and compromised immune function.
Nanoparticles can be used to deliver chemotherapeutics medication directly to the tumor while sparing healthy tissue. They can:
- protect drugs from being degraded in the body before they reach their target.
- enhance the absorption of drugs into tumors and into the cancerous cells themselves.
- prevent drugs from interacting with normal cells and avoiding side effects.
Using nanoparticles, drug doses could be much smaller than doses typically used in chemotherapy, making the procedure potentially much safer.
Experiments with mice bearing human breast tumors showed that the injected nanoparticles were readily detected in tumors by using a commercial magnetic resonance imaging scanner within five hours after injection. Scientists kept pancreas and kidney cancers from spreading through the bodies of mice by using tumor-targeting nanoparticles filled with chemotherapy drugs. Although their nanoparticles didn’t affect the original tumor, they did stop the cancers from spreading metastasis.
Patients often don’t die from primary tumors, which can be recognized and treated. Patients die from metastatic disease (for example, when a breast cancer spreads to the liver, the lymph nodes, the brain), which is much more difficult to treat than the primary tumor.
Those patients could theoretically be treated with nano drugs, in the hope that it would prolong the progression of the disease, that the metastatic lesions would slow.
A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials.