Mirkin Research Group/Northwestern University
Solubility, efficacy and safety. The keywords for the success of a medicine that could revolutionize oncology.
The traditional chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) is often ineffective, and even causes nausea, fatigue and even heart failure. But the solution may finally be elsewhere.
“We all know that chemotherapy is often extremely toxic,” researcher Chad A. Mirkin told . “But many people don’t realize that it is also often little soluble, so we need to find ways to transform it into water-soluble forms and manage it effectively.”
And that’s what his team did. In a new one published last month in ACS Nano, Mirking and colleagues created a new medicine entirely from scratch as a spherical nucleic acid (SNA), a nano-scale structure that incorporates medicine into DNA strands surrounding tiny beads.
When it was tested in a small animal model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive and difficult-to-treat blood cancer, the SNA-based version showed remarkable results.
The medicine penetrated leukemic cells 12.5 times more efficiently, destroyed them up to 20,000 times more effectively and slowed the progression of cancer by 59 times, all without causing noticeable side effects.
“In animal models, we demonstrated that we can stop tumors from advancing.”said the investigator. “If this translates to human patients, it would be a really exciting advance. It would mean more effective chemotherapy, better response rates and fewer side effects. This is always the goal of any type of cancer treatment.”
