BWH Researchers Combat Cancer with Nanoparticles

A team of BWH and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers led by BWH’s Omid C. Farokhzad, MD, and MIT Professor Robert Langer found a way to use custom-designed nanoparticles to home in on dangerous cancer cells and deliver a lethal dose of chemotherapy directly into those cells, leaving the normal, healthy cells unharmed.

“We’re most interested in developing a system that ends up in the clinic helping patients,” Farokhzad said. “We brought in cancer specialists and urologists to collaborate.”

The team chose nanoparticles as the drug delivery vehicles because they are so small that living cells readily swallow them when they arrive at the cell’s surface. Langer said that particles larger than 200 nanometers are less likely to get swallowed through a cell’s membrane. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The research team created particles that are about 150 nanometers in size; a thousand sitting side by side might equal the width of a human hair.

The team experimented on cells growing in laboratory dishes, and then on mice bearing human prostate tumors. “A single injection of our nanoparticles completely eradicated the tumors in five of the seven treated animals, and the remaining animals also had significant tumor reduction, compared to the (untreated) control (animals),” Farokhzad said.

Further testing is needed to ensure that the system will be safe and effective for humans.

The team published their findings in the April 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Additional authors of the paper are Jianjun Cheng, a former postdoctoral fellow with Langer now at the University of Illinois; Benjamin A. Teply of BWH and Harvard; Ines Sherifi of BWH and Harvard; Sangyong Jon, a former postdoctoral fellow with Langer now at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea; Philip W. Kantoff of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and Jerome P. Richie of BWH and Harvard.