Medicine
Nanotechnology research is making exciting advances in a number of different academic fields, but it is in medicine where the tiniest particles can make the biggest differences. Treating cancer has always been a challenge, but one type of cancer is especially difficult, aggressive, and most often terminal.
Mesothelioma is a type of cancer that mostly affects the tissue that lines the lungs and the chest cavity. It is associated with exposure to asbestos and has affected thousands of people. Now, advances in the use of nanoparticles are giving these patients new hope.
Nanoparticles and Targeted Treatment
There are many different forms that nanotechnology can take, but in medicine and cancer treatment, tiny biomolecules, termed nanoparticles are proving to be useful in a number of treatments. For cancer and mesothelioma, nanoparticles can be used to encapsulate and then deliver medications or other factors directly to a tumor and directly into cancer cells.Medicinal nanoparticles may range in size from just ten nanometers to 200 nanometers. The surfaces can be designed for different uses and to minimize the chances that they will be destroyed by a patient’s immune system. In targeting nanoparticles to cancer cells, antibodies can be used on the surface. Researchers doing this work select an antibody that matches receptors on the surfaces of cancer cells in the target tumor. This allows the nanoparticle to be directed right to the tumor and the cells of interest.
What makes targeted nanoparticles such an important achievement in cancer treatment is that it could replace systemic chemotherapy, which is the administration of chemotherapeutic drugs intravenously. It is systemic because the drugs spread throughout the body and act on any fast growing cells, not just cancer cells. This is what makes chemotherapy so uncomfortable for patients. It causes painful side effects, as well as hair loss. If those same drugs can be targeted at tumors specifically, side effects could be avoided and that would be a big deal for cancer patients.
Using Nanoparticles to Deliver Genetic Material
Nanoparticles that are targeted to strike tumors in the body can encapsulate chemotherapy drugs, but also genetic factors. These factors can be used to insert, delete, or change genes in cancer cells to direct them to slow their growth, to stop dividing, or to die. Research into this use for nanoparticles is already underway and has shown some promising and hopeful results for mesothelioma patients.A group of researchers in Australia recently eliminated nearly all the cancer cells from a patient with late-stage mesothelioma. This is a huge achievement because mesothelioma in its later stages is very difficult to treat and is considered, short of a miracle, impossible to cure. One patient out of a group of six in this research saw almost complete remission after treatment with nanoparticles containing genetic factors. This was after the patient had failed to respond to several rounds of conventional chemotherapy.
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The genetic material used in the nanoparticles is called microRNA, or miRNA. These small pieces of genetic material were used in the study to insert a gene into the cells of mesothelioma tumors. Research had previously found a gene missing from the cancer cells, and by inserting this missing gene, the miRNA acted like a tumor suppressant, slowing and stopping the growth of tumors.Nanotechnology is leading a revolution in science, but in medicine the use of nanoparticles means so much more. It means that patients who had previously had no hope of surviving a difficult cancer like mesothelioma, now can dream of a day when this cancer and others may be treatable and even curable.
By  Virgil Anderson | Embed |
Virgil Anderson is a mesothelioma cancer survivor. He was treated by the carer network at mesothelioma.net, and wants more cancer patients find this information. | |
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