Researchers at Penn State College of Medicine are working on a new nanotechnology drug delivery system to treat breast cancer. The "NanoJacket" particle targets a gene mutation that causes overexpression of an oncogenic protein in breast cancer patients with poor outcomes and delivers an RNA segment that kills cancer cells.
"Current cancer fighting drugs are limited by the inability of the medicine to get efficiently into the cancer cells, without affecting other normal growing cells," Kester said in a statement.
"The next generation of cancer fighting agents are novel molecular-based drugs, therapies that target mutated genes, which are also severely limited by cell impermeability, toxicity, and degradation. Nanotechnology offers the promise of enhancing the ability of cancer cells to accept these molecular-based medications by targeted delivery via nontoxic, nanosized packages."
Nanotechnology is increasingly moving from futuristic fantasy to reality, with researchers and developers working on a number of products, such as nanotech-embedded devices and fabrics.
To learn more:
- read the Penn State announcement
- see an abstract of the proposed research