UCLA researchers use nanoparticles to send chemotherapy drug directly to the tumor site, reducing damage to healthy tissues
By Shaun Mason
The overall five-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer is just 6 percent, and there is an urgent need for new treatment options. More than 80 percent of pancreatic cancer diagnoses occur too late for surgery, making chemotherapy the only possible treatment. Scientists from the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed a delivery system for one chemotherapy drug that greatly reduces the occurrence of serious side effects while enhancing the drug’s effectiveness against pancreatic cancer. The approach uses mesoporous silica nanoparticles to deliver the drug directly to the tumor instead of having the free drug spread throughout the body via the bloodstream.
The study was led by Dr. Andre Nel, associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute, and Huan Meng, an assistant professor of nanomedicine; it was published in the journal ACS Nano. Xiangsheng Liu, a postdoctoral scholar in the UC Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology, was the study’s first author.