CHAPEL HILL – A normally benign protein found in the human body appears to be able – when paired with nanoparticles – to zero in on and kill certain cancer cells, without having to also load those particles with chemotherapy drugs.
The finding could lead to a new strategy for targeted cancer therapies, according to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists who made the discovery.
However, they also cautioned that the result raises concerns about unanticipated “off-target” effects when designing nano-delivery agents.
Transferrin, the fourth most abundant protein in human blood, has been used as a tumor-targeting agent for delivering cancer drugs for almost two decades. The protein’s receptor is over-expressed on the surface of many rapidly growing cancers cells, so treatments combined with transferrin ligands are able to seek out and bind to them. Nanoparticles infused with transferrin have long been regarded as safe and nontoxic.
Now, UNC researchers have shown that, surprisingly, attaching transferrin to a nanoparticle surface can effectively and selectively target and kill B-cell lymphoma cells, found in an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It had been thought that nanoparticles would also need to carry toxic chemotherapy agents to have such an effect.
The scientists say the result is an interesting development in the field of nanomedicine, which researchers hope will eventually provide widely accepted alternatives – or replacements – to chemo and radiation treatment.
The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by Joseph DeSimone, Ph.D., Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of Chemistry in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences and William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, along with Jin Wang, Ph.D., and Shaomin Tian, Ph.D., in DeSimone’s lab. Their findings appear in this week’s online issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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Tags: cancer treatment, Joseph DeSimone, nanoparticles, Nanotech, UNC Chapel Hill
