Grind cancer cells

Spinning nanoparticles destroy the tumor

Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaConventional chemotherapy with radiotherapy, as you know, are not particularly accurate and hit not only tumor cells, but also healthy ones.

Therefore, scientists have been trying for years to either improve the accuracy of both, or to create a new drug that will obviously not touch healthy tissues, but will deal exclusively with the destruction of cancer.

In search of such a drug, researchers often turn to nanoparticles that either directly kill the tumor or incite the immune system against it. Erik Renstrom from Lund University (Sweden) and his colleagues from Germany, the USA and the UK (Zhang et al., Dynamic Magnetic Fields Remote-Control Apoptosis via Nanoparticle Rotation) present another antitumor nanonovue on the pages of ACS Nano.

In their experiments, the researchers used specially magnetized iron oxide nanoparticles. In the cell, these nanoparticles got into lysosomes, membrane organelles, whose task is to cleanse the cell of everything foreign and potentially dangerous.

But when the nanoparticles were in the cell, they were affected by a magnetic field that forced them to rotate. Rotating, they destroyed the membrane of lysosomes, which, in turn, triggered a program of cellular suicide – apoptosis.

Nanoparticles that destroy the lysosome in a cancer cell by their rotation.
DMF is a dynamic magnetic field, SPION is superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles.
(Illustration by the authors of the work.)

Magnetized nanoparticles have already been used to fight cancer: two years ago we wrote about a similar method in which a magnetic field heated nanoparticles trapped in malignant cells, thereby killing them. However, in this case, there is a high risk that heating will trigger an inflammatory reaction in nearby healthy tissues. With rotating particles, healthy cells cannot be indirectly damaged (unless, of course, these particles fall exclusively into cancer cells).

It is clear that the main task of scientists here was to make nanoparticles rotate in a magnetic field. Perhaps they can be useful for other diseases, but first you need to think about how to bring them to clinical trials.

Prepared based on the materials of Lund University: Nanoparticles cause cancer cells to self-destruct.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru07.04.2014