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Just two doses of the new nanoparticles reduced the cancer by 70%

Georgy Golovanov, Hi-tech+

Destroying cancer cells is not the most difficult thing in the fight against cancer. It is much more difficult to do this without harming healthy tissues. German scientists have developed nanoparticles that emit a cargo of drugs exclusively inside the tumor, but keep them securely sealed inside themselves when they are inside healthy cells. Experiments on mice have shown that the new therapy works perfectly.

Today, radiation and chemotherapy are considered the leading methods of cancer treatment, but these procedures are unpleasant, weakness and pain appear as side effects. Scientists are trying to make cancer drugs more selective in choosing targets, using what distinguishes tumor cells from healthy ones.

Specialists at the University of Munich have developed new nanoparticles that dump a load of drugs only inside cancer cells, according to a press release of Nanoparticles as weapons against cancer. These are amorphous, porous particles coated with a lipid layer. Such properties hide the particles well from the attention of the immune system. After penetration into malignant cells, the lipid membrane is destroyed, releasing calcium and citrate. Previous studies have shown that these substances are able to destroy the cells inside which they are located.

A drawing from an article by von Schirnding et al. Synergistic Combination of Calcium and Citrate in Mesoporous Nanoparticles Targets Pleural Tumors, published in the journal Chem – VM.

For what reason the lipid layer is destroyed only in cancer cells — scientists, in fact, do not know. But during tests on cell cultures and live mice, they found that some mechanisms in cancer cells cause a violation of the outer membrane, whereas in healthy cells this does not happen.

In experiments on mice, the researchers managed to selectively get rid of two different types of aggressive pleural tumors. Two doses were enough to reduce the size of the tumor by 40% and 70%, respectively. In addition, the procedure did not give any side effects during the two months of observation.

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