Difficult to treat cancers often produce special proteins that defend tumors from cancer drugs before those even reach their targets. Ferrying drugs safely into tumor cells can turn otherwise untreatable cancers into more manageable diseases. Researchers at the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT have developed a dual shelled nanoparticle that has an anti-cancer drug payload at its core, an outer shell that seeks out and sticks to the tumor, and an inner shell made of siRNA (small interfering RNA) chained to polypeptides that moderates the tumors resistance to the drug.
The team tested the particles on mice with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and showed an 80% reduction of the gene activity targeted by the siRNA and an eight-fold reduction of tumor volume without increased levels of toxicity.
From the study abstract:
The results indicate that the use of layer-by-layer films to modify a simple liposomal doxorubicin delivery construct with a synergistic siRNA can lead to significant tumor reduction in the cancers that are otherwise nonresponsive to treatment with Doxil or other common chemotherapy drugs. This approach provides a potential strategy to treat aggressive and resistant cancers, and a modular platform for a broad range of controlled multidrug therapies customizable to the cancer type in a singular nanoparticle delivery system.
Study in ACS Nano: Layer-by-Layer Nanoparticles for Systemic Codelivery of an Anticancer Drug and siRNA for Potential Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Treatment
American Chemical Society: Stealth nanoparticles lower drug-resistant tumors’ defense…
