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Mini-cells could reduce chemotherapy side-effects, or eliminate it completely

Posted May 08, 2007 at 04:19AM by Ryan C. Listed in: Biomedical Technology, Diseases Tags: Australia
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Cancer Cell - Image 1


The Chinese have a saying: "Good medicine tastes bad." Literally, it means that anything medicinal that isn't appealing to the palate at all should be good for you - and it's definitely the case with chemotherapy, known not only for being one of the main treatments for cancer but also for its debilitating side effects. But Himanshu Brahmbhatt and Jennifer MacDiarmid, of EnGeneIC in Sydney, Australia, may have found a way for the unpalatable to be survivable - as Linda Geddes of New Scientist reports.

Their breakthrough? Mini-cells, or small buds of cytoplasm that could be used to deliver high-dose combinations of drugs directly into where they're needed the most, as well as keep the drugs away from the rest of the body. This means reduced - if not completely eliminated - toxic side effects that chemotherapy usually comes with, as well as drastically lowering the amount of drugs being used.

What's the secret to these microscopic 'smart bombs'? The answer lies in bacteria - or in the division of them, to be exact. When bacteria divides, they usually divide right down the middle - that is, Himanshu Brahmbatt and Jennifer MacDiarmid found a way to change the process, forcing bacteria to divide at their ends and produce small buds of cytoplasm. These buds, as Brahmbhatt and MacDiarmid have found out, could be packed with a range of drugs that they would only release if they're inside their target cells and never before. Dubbed EnGeneIC Delivery Vehicles or EDV, these 'smart bombs' are cheap and easy to produce, making them cost-efficient drug delivery vehicles.

The wonders continue with this breakthrough. Not only are EDVs hardy enough to survive a direct injection, they're just the right size to fit into the holes of leaky, cancer cell-supplying blood vessels and into tumor tissue. Brahmbhatt confirms this, saying, "Within 2 hours of intravenous administration greater than 30% of the dose ends up in the tumour microenvironment." And once the EDVs have successfully attached themselves to the correct cell, they're internalised and broken down, releasing the drug into the cell itself to achieve maximum effect.

And it's not all baseless conjecture, either - they've already tested the EDVs' effectiveness on mice, using doxorubicin (breast/ovarian/leukemia tumor treatment) as payload, and so far the results are nothing short of optimistic, with treated mice showing significant inhibition of tumor growth as compared to those untreated. And with the succeeding tests with monkeys and pigs showing no toxic side effects whatsoever, MacDiarmid and Brahmbhatt are hoping to go into human testing as early as this year.

So the dream of controllable nanobots being inserted directly into the body to combat diseases in a cellular level may be realized sooner than we think - and in a much more affordable way. Johannes Fruehauf, an expert in cancer RNAi, has this to say about using bacteria as EDVs: "Previous efforts to develop targeted nanoparticles have focused on synthetic methods, which are very expensive. Here they are using bacteria like little biorobots."

Ingenious AND inexpensive. We'll keep you updated on the developments of this breakthrough.

[Via New Scientist] Permalink  |   Email this  |   Linking Blogs   |   Digg It!

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