Study suggests new ways to improve anti-cancer chemotherapies
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A study released this week suggests that anti-cancer chemotherapies which use nanoparticles to deliver drugs deep inside tumor tissue will be more effective if the particles are positively electrically charged because they are taken up to a greater extent by proliferating cells, according to a team of chemists and chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This is because a positive surface charge allows better uptake of the nanoparticles across the cell membrane, a mechanism which the researchers found controls delivery to most tumor cells. At the same time, “negative particles, which diffuse more quickly, may perform better when delivering drugs deep into tissues,” say UMass Amherst’s Neil Forbes, with chemist Vincent Rotello and colleagues. Their description of a new “tunable” delivery system appears in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
For this work, chemical engineer Forbes and colleagues invented a special three-dimensional cylindroidal “laboratory tumor” device about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. These allow researchers to study and compare relative uptake and diffusion rates of drug delivery particles at a medium complexity level, higher than single cells but less complex than a whole animal. As Forbes explains, “This middle ground turns out to be the size at which diffusion plays a role in chemotherapy drug delivery to tissues. Studying the cell level is too small; we already know that drugs can kill tumor cells there.”
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