Working in harmony

MIT News
June 20, 2011

For decades, researchers have been working to develop nanoparticles that deliver cancer drugs directly to tumors, minimizing the toxic side effects of chemotherapy. However, even with the best of these nanoparticles, only about 1 percent of the drug typically reaches its intended target.

Now, a team of researchers from MIT, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and the University of California at San Diego have designed a new type of delivery system in which a first wave of nanoparticles homes in on the tumor, then calls in a much larger second wave that dispenses the cancer drug. This communication between nanoparticles, enabled by the body’s own biochemistry, boosted drug delivery to tumors by more than 40-fold in a mouse study.

This new strategy could enhance the effectiveness of many drugs for cancer and other diseases, says Geoffrey von Maltzahn, a former MIT doctoral student now at Cambridge-based Flagship VentureLabs, and lead author of a paper describing the system in the June 19 online edition of Nature Materials.

“What we’ve demonstrated is that nanoparticles can be engineered to do things like communicate with each other in the body, and that these capabilities can improve the efficiency with which they find and treat diseases like cancer,” von Maltzahn says.

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