Drug Ferrying Na**particles Report Back While Killing Cancer Cells
 

Drug Ferrying Na**particles Report Back While Killing Cancer Cells
[IMG]http://www.medgadget.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/chemo-na**particle.jpg[/IMG]

Cancer therapies have a pernicious way of being effective only for a subset of people suffering from a particular manifestation of the disease. Because there’s ** way to k**w whether a treatment is working until long after it has begun, patients on chemo too often suffer from a medicine that does them ** good. **w researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have developed a “reporter na**particle” that is able to ferry medication and then detect cell death around itself to***tify clinicians whether the therapy it delivered is working.

Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe a particle that reacts to the presence of activated*caspase enzyme by emitting a green fluorescence. Caspase is activated in quantity during cellular death, so a bright glow produced by the na**particles is indicative that nearby cells are dying. Since the na**particles can be made to target specific tumor cells thanks to attached antibodies, the cells that die will be predominantly cancer cells.

The team tested the tech**logy using both the chemo drug*paclitaxel, as well as the*anti-PD-L1 immu**therapy agent, demonstrating that the tech**logy works with both types of therapy.

From the study abstract:

The reporter na**particles are engineered from a **vel two-staged stimuli-responsive polymeric material with an optimal ratio of an enzyme-cleavable drug or immu**therapy (effector elements) and a drug function-activatable reporter element. The spatiotemporally constrained delivery of the effector and the reporter elements in a single na**particle produces maximum signal enhancement due to the availability of the reporter element in the same cell as the drug, thereby effectively capturing the temporal apoptosis process. Using chemotherapy-sensitive and chemotherapy-resistant tumors in vivo, we show that the reporter na**particles can provide a real-time **ninvasive readout of tumor response to chemotherapy. The reporter na**particle can also monitor the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibition in mela**ma. The self-reporting capability, for the first time to our k**wledge, captures an anticancer na**particle in action in vivo.

Study in PNAS: Reporter na**particle that monitors its anticancer efficacy in real time…

Source: Brigham and Women’s…

The post Drug Ferrying Na**particles Report Back While Killing Cancer Cells appeared first on Medgadget.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Medgadget?d=yIl2AUoC8zA http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Medgadget?d=qj6IDK7rITs http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Medg...uQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Medgadget/~4/dPX-5Wqrmgc