UGA Researchers Use Nanoparticles To Fight Cancer

August 15, 2013



The immune system is good at its job, but it’s not perfect. Most cancerous cells, for example, are able to avoid detection by the immune system because they so closely resemble normal cells, leaving the cancerous cells free to multiply and grow into life-threatening tumors while the body’s only protectors remain unaware.


“What we are working on is specifically geared toward breast cancer,” said Dhar, the study’s co-author and an assistant professor of chemistry in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “Our paper reports for the first time that we can stimulate the immune system against breast cancer cells using mitochondria-targeted nanoparticles and light using a novel pathway.”


They then activated the nanoparticles inside the cancer cells by exposing them to a tissue-penetrating long wavelength laser light. Once activated, the nanoparticles disrupt the cancer cell’s normal processes, eventually leading to its death.


“We are able to potentially overcome some of the traditional drawbacks to today’s dendritic cell immunotherapy,” said Sean Marrache, a graduate student in Dhar’s lab. “By targeting nanoparticles to the mitochondria of cancer cells and exposing dendritic cells to these activated cancer cells, we found that the dendritic cells produced a high concentration of chemical signals that they normally don’t produce, and these signals have traditionally been integral to producing effective immune stimulation.”



“We particularly hope this technique could help patients with advanced metastatic disease that has spread to other parts of the body,” said Dhar, who also is a member of the UGA Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, Cancer Center and Center for Drug Discovery.


Once in the bloodstream, the newly activated cells would alert the immune system to the cancer’s presence and destroy it.

“These are the things we can now do with nanotechnology,” Dhar said. “If we can refine the process further, we may be able to use similar techniques against other forms of cancer as well.”

A full version of the paper is available at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/nn403158n.

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Source: UGA Today

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