News from Italy
New treatment method that will revolutionise lung cancer
Vita gazette – Scientists have developed microscopic robots capable of swimming through the lungs to deliver cancer-fighting medication directly to metastatic tumours.
Lung cancer treatment is very difficult. The reason is that inadequate therapy does not directly target the lungs; it does not accumulate in high enough concentrations to kill tumors. A new method has been found to destroy the walls that block the path of drugs used in cancer treatment.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed microscopic robots, known as microrobots, capable of swimming through the lungs to deliver cancer-fighting medication directly to metastatic tumors. This approach has shown promise in mice, inhibiting the growth and spread of tumors that had metastasised to the lungs, thereby boosting survival rates compared to control treatments.
To create the microrobots, researchers chemically attached drug-filled nanoparticles to the surface of green algae cells. The algae, which provide the microrobots with their movement, enable the nanoparticles to efficiently swim around in the lungs and deliver their therapeutic payload to tumors. The nanoparticles are made of tiny, biodegradable polymer spheres loaded with the chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin and coated with red blood cell membranes. This coating serves a critical function: it protects the nanoparticles from the immune system, allowing them to stay in the lungs long enough to exert their anti-tumor effects. It also acts as camouflage. This coating makes the nanoparticle look like a red blood cell from the body, so it will not trigger an immune response.
Positive results from mouse experiments
Scientists also obtained positive results in their experiments on mice. Mice with lung tumors were treated with microrobots sent to their bodies through a small tube inserted into their windpipes. While the average survival time of mice whose successful treatment was 37 days, this period was 27 days in untreated mice. The team is working to test this microrobot treatment in larger animals in the future. The ultimate goal is human clinical trials.
The microrobots are an ingenious combination of biology and nanotechnology. They are a joint effort between the labs of Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang, both professors in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.