NanoComputer

An Indiana University School of Medicine breast cancer surgeon is pursuing research that will utilize glass, gold, nanotechnology and Greek mythology hoping to vanquish breast cancer that has metastasized to the brain. Susan E. Clare, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the IU School of Medicine, is the initiating principal investigator for a $573,000 Department of Defense grant that will allow her to explore a new approach to delivering therapy to brain metastases from primary breast cancer. As did the Greeks of old, Dr. Clare hopes to covertly deliver “warriors” to the enemy stronghold, in this case a metastatic brain tumor. Her research will explore using a cell from the body’s immune system to deliver chemotherapy directly to the brain metastases. The drug or other therapeutic is attached to the nanospheres, which are carried within the immune cell, much as soldiers were carried within the Trojan Horse. The immune cells travel in the bloodstream and release the drug when it has reached the tumor site.

“The problem for almost all drugs, and HER2-targeted drugs are no exception, is that the blood-brain barrier is a significant impediment to delivering therapies in concentrations that can be effective,” Dr. Clare said.

That biological issue caused Dr. Clare to explore other methods of delivering drugs to metastatic brain tumors. Using nanoparticles called “nanoshells,” developed by Naomi J. Halas, Ph.D., D.Sc., director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University, Dr. Clare hopes to target the brain tumors with lapatinib at a dose sufficient to shut down the signaling pathway needed for the cancer cells to proliferate.

Source: http://news.medicine.iu.edu

UCLA researchers led by Professor Dean Ho from the Jane and Jerry Weintraub Center for Reconstructive Biotechnology, have developed a potentially more effective treatment for breast cancer. Doctors have begun to categorize breast cancers into four main groups according to the genetic makeup of the cancer cells. Which category a cancer falls into generally determines the best method of treatment. But cancers in one of the four groups — called “basal-like” or “triple-negative” breast cancer (TNBC) — have been particularly tricky to treat because they usually don’t respond to the “receptor-targeted” treatments that are often effective in treating other types of breast cancer. TNBC tends to be more aggressive than the other types and more likely to recur, and can also have a higher mortality rate. Using nanodiamonds between 4 and 6 nanometers in diameter and shaped like tiny soccer balls, the researchers form clusters following drug binding that have the ability to precisely deliver cancer drugs to tumors, significantly improving the drugs’ desired effect. In the UCLA study, the nanodiamond delivery system has been able to home in on tumor masses in mice with triple negative breast cancer.

“This study demonstrates the versatility of the nanodiamond as a targeted drug-delivery agent to a tumor site,” said Ho, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCLA Department of Bioengineering. “The agent we’ve developed reduces the toxic side effects that are associated with treatment and mediates significant reductions in tumor size.”
Findings from the study are published online April 15 in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials.
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Malignant cells that leave a primary tumor, travel the bloodstream and grow out of control in new locations cause the vast majority of cancer deaths. After a breast cancer cell enters the bloodstream, it most often stops in the liver, spleen or lungs and begins overexpressing surface molecules called integrins. Integrins act as a glue between the cancer cell and the lining of a blood vessel that feeds the organ. A team of scientists, engineers and students across five disciplines from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio – USA – built nanochains that home in on metastases before they’ve grown into new tissues, and, through magnetic resonance imaging, detect their locations. Images of the precise location and extent of metastases could be used to guide surgery or ablation, or the same technology used to find the cancer could be used to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly to the cells before a tumor forms, the researchers suggest. The work is described in this week’s online issue of the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
“Micrometastases can’t be seen with the naked eye, but you have to catch them at this stage – see the exact spots they’re located and see them all,” said Efstathios Karathanasis, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and radiology, and senior author. “Even if you miss only one, you prolong survival, but one metastasis can still kill.”
Source: http://www.case.edu/
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn303833p

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), affiliate to Harvard Medical School,  are the first to report a new approach that integrates rational drug design with supramolecular nanochemistry in cancer treatment. Supramolecular chemistry is the development of complex chemical systems using molecular building blocks. The researchers utilized such methods to create nanoparticles that significantly enhanced antitumor activity with decreased toxicity in breast and ovarian cancer models

"This work is effectively moving beyond using nanotechnology as drug 'delivery' vehicles to reengineering drugs themselves so that they become nanomedicines." said Shiladitya Sengupta, PhD, MSc, BWH associate bioengineer, and senior study author . 

Source: http://www.brighamandwomens.org/about_bwh/publicaffairs/news/pressreleases/PressRelease.aspx?PageID=%201212

Researchers at Brown University and Hasbro Children’s Hospital have traced the molecular interactions that allow the protein survivin to escape the nucleus of a breast cancer cell and prolong the cell’s life. That  may help in the development of better therapies and prognostics.The study’s senior author Dr. Rachel Altura, associate professor of pediatrics in The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a pediatric oncologist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital reports: “You always have to worry about all the things you don’t know that you are targeting,”. “If we can target HDAC6, we can maybe block survivin from coming out of the nucleus and maintain it in its good state.” The present strategy is to block CRM1, Altura said, an idea she is pursuing with a pharmaceutical company in breast cancer cells in the lab. She said preliminary experiments look promising in keeping survivin inside the nucleus and making cancer cells more susceptible to dying.

Best kept behind barsInside the nucleus, survivin behaves. If it escapes, it can give a cancer cell great longevity. Three proteins conspire to help survivin break out of the nucleus. The darker area around the nucleus, above, is HDAC6, one of the conspirators. 

Source: http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2012/03/survivin

By shining infrared light on specially designed, gold-filled silicon wafers, scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute (Houston, Texas) have successfully targeted and burned breast cancer cells. If the technology is shown to work in human clinical trials, it could provide patients a non-invasive alternative to surgical ablation, and could be used in conjunction with traditional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, to make those treatments more effective.

"Hollow gold nanoparticles can generate heat if they are hit with a near-infrared laser," said Research Institute Assistant Member Haifa Shen, M.D., Ph.D., the report's lead author. "Multiple investigators have tried to use gold nanoparticles for cancer treatment, but the efficiency has not been very good — they'd need a lot of gold nanoparticles to treat a tumor. "Instead, Shen and his colleagues turned to a technology developed by the study's principal investigator, Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., to amplify the gold particles' response to infrared light.

"We developed a system based on Dr. Ferrari's multi-stage vector technology platform to treat cancers with heat," Shen said. "We found that heat generation was much more efficient when we loaded gold nanoparticles into porous silicon, the carrier of the multistage vectors."

The research is presented in the first issue of the new Advanced Healthcare Materials, a Wiley journal.

Source: http://www.methodisthealth.com/breast-cancer-cells-targeted-then-burned-by-gold-filled-silicon-wafers