A new treatment developed by researchers targets lung cancer cells with unprecedented precision, using nanoparticles to directly deliver chemotherapy drugs, potentially transforming cancer treatment by reducing side effects and improving treatment effectiveness. The technology uses the patient's own cells as Trojan horses to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly to tumors.
Lung cancer may not be the most common type of cancer, but it is by far the deadliest.
Despite treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, only about a quarter of lung cancer patients live more than five years after diagnosis, according to the World Health Organization.
To improve the odds of survival for lung cancer patients, researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical Center have pioneered a new method of delivering cancer-killing drugs directly to cancer cells.
"Our approach uses the patient's own cellular material as a Trojan horse to deliver a targeted drug payload directly to the lung cancer cells," said Kytai T. Nguyen, the Alfred R. and Janet H. Potvin Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering at UTA. "The process involves isolating T cells, a type of immune cell, from cancer patients and engineering them so that they express specific receptors for the cancer cells."
Key steps in the new technology include isolating the cell membranes from these engineered T cells, loading the membranes with chemotherapy drugs, and then coating them onto tiny drug-delivery particles. These nanoparticles are about 1/100 the size of a human hair.
When these coated nanoparticles are injected back into the patient's body, the cell membrane acts as a guide, guiding the nanoparticles precisely to the tumor cells. This approach is designed to trick the patient's immune system, as the coated nanoparticles mimic the properties of immune cells and avoid detection and clearance by the body.
"The key advantage of this approach is that it is highly targeted, which allows it to overcome the limitations of traditional chemotherapy, which can often cause harmful side effects and reduce patients' quality of life," said co-author Jon Weidanz, vice president of research and innovation and researcher in kinesiology and bioengineering. By delivering chemotherapy directly to tumor cells, the system is designed to minimize collateral damage to healthy tissue.
In this study, researchers added the anti-cancer drug cisplatin to the nanoparticles. Membrane-coated nanoparticles accumulated in parts of the body with tumors but not in other parts of the body. As a result, this targeted drug delivery system was able to reduce tumor size in the control group, demonstrating its efficacy.
"This personalized approach could pave the way for a new era of medicine tailored to each patient's unique characteristics and the specific properties of their tumor," Nguyen said. "The potential to reduce side effects and improve efficacy makes our technology a noteworthy advancement in cancer treatment."
Compiled from:ScitechDaily