Chemotherapy is set to become better at treating cancer, while also carrying fewer debilitating side effects, thanks to a new drug delivery method which has been developed by a chemistry professor at Dublin City University (DCU).
“Traditional chemotherapy treatments can be imprecise,” said Silvia Giordani, professor of nano materials at DCU’s school of chemical sciences, who led research funded by Research Ireland and published in the scientific journal Nanoscale.
“They often affect the whole body instead of just the area needing treatment, which can cause nasty side effects for patients, such as hair loss, nausea and fatigue.”
Some 45,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year in the State, about 28 per cent of whom undergo chemotherapy as part of their treatment.
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The new drug delivery method is based on nanotechnology – the science of the very small – and means more of a chemotherapy drug can be delivered right to its cancer target, with less collateral damage to surrounding healthy cells.
“Improved drug delivery methods aim to target specific areas of the body more accurately, reducing side effects and potentially making treatments more effective,” said Prof Giordani.
The new delivery method, in this experiment, was used against fast-growing triple-negative breast cancer cells, where, she said, there are fewer therapeutic options.
“Doxorubicin, the chemotherapy drug used in this study, is cardiotoxic and can damage patients’ hearts,” said Prof Giordani.
“We have shown that when tested in human heart cells on a Petri dish our nanocarrier causes less damage to heart cells than the drug alone.
“This approach not only increases the effectiveness of treatment against triple-negative breast cancer, but also opens the door to potentially using similar methods for other hard-to-treat cancers.”
For a number of years, Prof Giordani had been exploring the potential of structures called “carbon nano-onions” to better deliver drugs to cancer cells inside the body.
The structures, she said, can be thought of as being like Russian dolls on a tiny scale, invisible to the eye, made up of carbon atoms. They consist of spheres of carbon in layers, like an onion – so small that 12,000 of them side by side would span the width of one human hair.
The shape and high surface area of these carbon nano-onions enable them to be loaded with medication, their small size allows for easy travel inside the body, while they can be easily modified to precisely target cancer cells.
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“Much like inputting a specific type of infected cell into their GPS co-ordinates, we can precisely target various diseases, not just cancer,” said Prof Giordani. “We can also load different drugs on to our carbon nano-onions to treat different diseases.
“For patients, it could translate to better outcomes, shorter recovery times and a much-improved quality of life during the treatment.”
