Swarms of Nanoparticles Help Cancer Drug Kill Tumors

Researchers at MIT have discovered that attaching large numbers of polymeric nanoparticles to tumor cells makes those cells more susceptible to resveratrol, a drug that motivates cancer cells to kill themselves. While the nanoparticles don’t kill the cells, they seem to exaggerate the physical forces that moving blood and other processes apply to the cells. This seems to quicken the cells’ turn toward apoptosis that is triggered by the exposure to resveratrol.

“When you attach many particles to the membranes of these cells, and then expose them to forces that mimic those in the human body, like blood flow, these therapeutics become more effective. It’s a way of amplifying the forces on the cells using polymeric materials,” according to a released statement by Michael Mitchell, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In lab mice, the addition of the nanoparticles made the drug approximately 50% more effective at reducing tumor sizes.

Besides pointing to the nanoparticles as being effective at helping this cancer drug work, this study may also help lead to the development of related therapies that increase the physical forces applied to tumor cells during drug treatments.

Study in Nature Communications: Polymeric mechanical amplifiers of immune cytokine-mediated apoptosis…

Via: MIT…