A new study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has revealed that reshaping chemotherapy drug nanoparticles from sphere-shape to a rod-shape can increase the effectiveness of the anti-cancer drug therapies, reports Medical Xpress.
The new findings suggest that the change in the shape of the chemotherapy drug nanoparticles increases the effectiveness of the anti-cancer drug therapies by up to 10,000 times. The change can significantly improve the possibilities of curing the disease and also in the reduction of the side effects involved in chemotherapy, the report said.
"Conventional anti-cancer drugs accumulate in the liver, lungs and spleen instead of the cancer cell site due to inefficient interactions with the cancer cell membrane," Samir Mitragotri, professor of chemical engineering and Director of the Center for BioEngineering at UCSB, said in the report. "We have found our strategy greatly enhances the specificity of anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells."
The bioengineering researchers involved in the study developed the rod-shaped nanoparticles using a chemotherapeutic drug, camptothecin, a natural ingredient taken from the bark and stem of a tree named Camptotheca, also known as "Happy Tree," which is used in the anticancer drugs.
These rod-shaped nanoparticles were coated with trastuzumab, an antibody commonly used in the treatment of certain breast cancers. The new developed nanorods were found to be 10,000-fold more effective than trastuzumab alone and 10-fold more effective than camptothecin alone in slowing down the process of breast cancer cell growth, according to the Medical Xpress report.
Mitragotri termed the work as a "new direction in chemotherapy" with the reshaping of the anti-cancer drugs for better effectiveness, reported the Medical Xpress. Mitragotri and his team including Sutapa Barua and Jin-Wook Yoo, post -doctoral researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Poornima Kolhar, graduated from the same university, observed human breast cancer cells to learn how the shape plays an important role in functioning inside the body.
"We were inspired to look at the shape as a key parameter by natural objects. In nature, all key particles such as viruses, bacteria, red blood cells, platelets are non-spherical," Mitragotri said. "Their shape plays a key role in their function."
Yatin Gokarn and Aditya Wakankar of Genentech, a drug developing company that also provides trastuzumab antibodies, appreciated the breakthrough in the discovery of finding a unique way that increases the effectiveness of anti-cancer drugs. Genetech is a part of the Roche group
The findings of the study are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
