TimmyHAnti-Cancer Nanotube Breakthrough
September 23rd 2008 03:12
The main problem with anti-cancer drugs is that they are quickly cleared from the bloodstream, so very little ever actually reaches the cancer. This means that large doses are usually needed to ensure that enough drugs reach the tumour. And since these drugs can be absorbed by normal cells, high doses cause unpleasant side effects.
Standford University researchers have found that carbon nanotubes loaded with anti-cancer drugs are able to target tumour cells and shy away from healthy tissue.
"Carbon nanotubes are one-dimensional, which sets them apart from other drug-delivery systems," says Hongjie Dai, a chemistry professor at Stanford, who led the research.
The nanotubes--on average 100 nanometers long and a few nanometers wide--pass easily through the leaky walls of tumour blood vessels but do not get into healthy blood vessels. So the researchers realized that drugs attached to the nanotubes could be carried inside tumours without harming normal tissue.
The drug-delivery technique was tested in mice that had been injected with breast cancer cells. After 22 days of testing, they found that the tumours treated by nanotube delivery were less than half the size of the tumours treated by the second most effective treatment, Taxol.
The Stanford group plans to further investigate how the size of nanotubes affects drug circulation in the blood, penetration into both tumor and healthy cells, and the overall efficiency of drug delivery. Since there are relatively few anticancer drug carriers approved for clinical use, "there is a lot of room to develop this new drug-delivery method," says Dai.
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Nano-Cancer Breakthrough
"Carbon nanotubes are one-dimensional, which sets them apart from other drug-delivery systems," says Hongjie Dai, a chemistry professor at Stanford, who led the research.
The nanotubes--on average 100 nanometers long and a few nanometers wide--pass easily through the leaky walls of tumour blood vessels but do not get into healthy blood vessels. So the researchers realized that drugs attached to the nanotubes could be carried inside tumours without harming normal tissue.
The drug-delivery technique was tested in mice that had been injected with breast cancer cells. After 22 days of testing, they found that the tumours treated by nanotube delivery were less than half the size of the tumours treated by the second most effective treatment, Taxol.
The Stanford group plans to further investigate how the size of nanotubes affects drug circulation in the blood, penetration into both tumor and healthy cells, and the overall efficiency of drug delivery. Since there are relatively few anticancer drug carriers approved for clinical use, "there is a lot of room to develop this new drug-delivery method," says Dai.
Really Long Link
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