44 nanotimes News in Brief

Cancer Therapy // Nanobubbles Bring Cancer Chemotherapy Inside Cells © Based on Material by Rice University

Using light-harvesting nanoparticles to convert laser energy into "plasmonic nanobubbles," researchers at Rice University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM, USA) are developing new methods to inject drugs and genetic payloads directly into cancer cells. In tests on drug-resistant cancer cells, the researchers found that delivering chemotherapy drugs with nanobubbles was up to 30 times more deadly to cancer cells than traditional drug treatment and required less than one-tenth the clinical dose.

"We are delivering cancer drugs or other genetic cargo at the single-cell level," said Rice’s Dmitri Lapotko, a biologist and physicist whose plasmonic nanobubble technique is the subject of four new peer-reviewed studies, including one due later this month in the journal Biomaterials and another published April 3 in the journal PLoS ONE. "By avoiding healthy cells and delivering the drugs directly inside cancer cells, we can simultaneously increase drug efficacy while lowering the dosage," he said.

Lapotko’s plasmonic nanobubbles are generated when a pulse of laser light strikes a plasmon, a wave of electrons that sloshes back and forth across the surface of a metal nanoparticle. By matching the wavelength of the laser to that of the plasmon, and dialing in just the right amount of laser energy, Lapotko’s team can ensure that nanobubbles form only around clusters of nanoparticles in cancer cells. Using the technique to get drugs through a cancer cell’s protective outer wall, or cell membrane, can dramatically improve the drug’s ability to kill the cancer cell, as shown by Lapotko and MD Anderson’s Xiangwei Wu in two recent studies, one in Biomaterials in February and another in Advanced Materials in March.

"Overcoming drug resistance represents one of the major challenges in cancer treatment," said Wu. "Targeting plasmonic nanobubbles to cancer cells has the potential to enhance drug delivery and cancer-cell killing."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5ImLfi1Wi5s

Ekaterina Y. Lukianova-Hleb, Xiaoyang Ren, Joseph A. Zasadzinski, Xiangwei Wu, Dmitri O. Lapotko: Plasmonic Nanobubbles Enhance Efficacy and Selectivity of Chemotherapy Against Drug-Resistant Cancer Cells, In: Advanced Materials Early View, March 07, 2012 DOI:10.1002/adma.201103550:

_{http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201103550}