A research team led by Omid Farokhzad from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) together with scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a drug delivery system for supplying a significant quantity of chemotherapeutic drugs to targeted prostate cancer cells.
Omid Farokhzad
Farokhzad's research team developed a selection strategy to design the vehicle. The strategy allows the researchers to efficiently choose ligands for specially targeting prostate cancer cells. Ligands are molecules capable of bonding to the cell surface. These ligands are then bonded with nanoparticles used in chemotherapy such as docetaxel.
Besides their bonding capability to prostate cancer cells, the ligands selected as per the strategy are capable of differentiating between cancerous cells and non-cancerous cells and can be engulfed by cancer cells. Since the ligands are designed to be swallowed by cancer cells deliberately, this drug delivery system can allow the transfer of large quantity of chemotherapeutic drugs into the cancerous cells, resulting in a more efficient cancer therapy method.
The ligand-nanoparticle components in this drug delivery system are capable of interacting with various antigens or cancer markers on the surface of the cell, making the system more widely applicable and versatile. Zeyu Xiao, a researcher from the BWH Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials, stated that this novel strategy allows the nanoparticles to specially target and effectively be swallowed by any types and sub-types of cancerous cells, even if their antigens are unidentified. This strategy facilitates the synthesis of targeted nanoparticles and widens its cancer therapy applications, Xiao added.