Cornell dots, or C dots for short, are tiny silica particles that fluoresce under certain conditions. They have shown promise as a way of tagging tumors in preparation for removal, but during safety testing of the C dots a remarkable new ability was discovered. When the peptide-coated C dots were introduced in high doses to tumor cells that were nutrient starved, they seemed to channel iron from the nearby environment into the inside of the tumor cells. This caused the nutrient deprived tumors to die due to their cells’ plasma membrane breaking up into multiple pieces.
Interestingly, this process does not seem to play out within healthy cells or well fed tumor cells. And it seems to work not just in a Petri dish, but in living animals too. When mice with tumors were exposed to high doses of the peptide-coated C dots, their tumors shrank while there were no noticeable side effects from the treatment.
Study in Nature Nanotechnology: Ultrasmall Nanoparticles Induce Ferroptosis of Nutrient-Deprived Cancer Cells and Suppress Tumor Growth…
Via: Cornell…