From hair loss to nausea and vomiting, the side effects of chemotherapy add difficulty to an already difficult experience. A new drug-delivery system developed by scientists at the Univ. of Toronto could do away with chemo’s collateral damage.
When injected into the body, chemotherapy drugs travel through the bloodstream, destroying fast-growing cells. Cancer cells, however, are not the only fast-growing cells in the body. Hair follicles, skin cells, and the lining of the digestive system also divide quickly, and therefore are unintended targets for cancer drugs.
Nanoparticles that carry drugs to diseased tissue have been developed in the past. The problem with such drug-delivery systems is their inability to alter their physicochemical properties (e.g., shape, size, and surface chemistry) as they move through different parts of the body.
The optimal physicochemical properties of nanoparticles for drug delivery vary with time and place within the living body. For example, rod-shaped particles are preferable for tumor penetration, whereas spherical nanoparticles are better for subsequent cellular uptake by cancer cells. And no two tumors are identical. The shape, size, and surface chemistry of a nanoparticle that can get inside a breast-cancer tumor may be different...
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