Nanoparticles aim drugs directly at brain tumors

08 March 2007

Nanoparticles – manufactured particles on the scale of atoms and molecules – are being developed to deliver drugs directly to cancer cells in the brain.

Right now, this system has been tested only on mice. Clinical trials involving people could begin within three years.

In order for most cancer drugs to be effective in the brain, they have to be administered in large doses. These toxic drugs kill the cancerous cells, but they also destroy healthy cells surrounding the tumor. Using nanotechnology, James Connor at Penn State University has devised a way to deliver smaller doses of drugs that target just cancerous cells using what’s known as a “lipid-based nanoparticle.”

James Connor: It’s really just a fat cell and inside this fat cell it’s empty, just a membrane of lipids and we can fill it up with whatever drug or gene that we think is going to do the job on the tumor cells.

One of the big problems with brain tumors is that they often come back.

But Connor told that once a cancer has gone into remission, small numbers of drug-delivering nanoparticles could be kept in the bloodstream as a kind of surveillance system to immediately attack cancer cells that may reappear.