Nanotransporters will deliver drugs to cancer cells
Nanotechnology is coming to oncology
STRF.ruThe Institute of Gene Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences is working on nanotransporters for anti-cancer drugs.
We are talking about creating special polymer shells that allow the drug to be delivered to exactly the cells that are needed, and to the place of the cell where it will act most effectively.
A lot of drugs do not have cell specificity, that is, they can get into both a cancer cell and a healthy one, damaging it. This is due to the fact that chemotherapy is hard to tolerate by cancer patients and at the same time is not effective enough, does not give significant improvement. Many side effects can be avoided if the drug is delivered purposefully only to cancer cells, to their nucleus. In this case, the effectiveness of the drug increases by several orders of magnitude. This effect can be achieved by using nanotransporters for drug delivery.
Research on the creation of nanotransporters is conducted in the "Laboratory of Molecular Genetics of Intracellular Transport" under the leadership of Professor Alexander Sobolev. It is for this Russian group of researchers that the world priority in this field remains.
The laboratory is equipped with the most modern equipment, which makes it possible to study the processes in the cell without destroying it. There is also such equipment that allows you to dramatically reduce labor costs during scientific work. For example, a machine that can independently separate different cells in a tissue culture, cut out cells of the desired type with a laser and catapult them through test tubes. Thus, only cells of this type will be in each tube, and they can then be examined separately. There is no similar equipment anywhere else in Russia. However, expensive equipment by itself does not provide guaranteed discoveries. Outstanding scientific achievements today can only be the result of combining modern equipment and advanced theory. And judging by the fact that joint research of this laboratory is offered by scientists from both Europe and the New World, this is just such a case.
In the very near future, the laboratory plans to move from research on cell cultures to testing nanotransporters on animal models, and there it is not far from the clinic.
Specialist's commentProfessor Alexander Sobolev:
Experiments on animals that we recently conducted together with our Dutch colleagues have demonstrated that the effectiveness of drugs increases significantly. Laboratory animals can be cured of tumors. The next step is to advance into the field of preclinical testing, and if everything goes well, then further.
To investigate a destroyed cage is like studying the peculiarities of the Moscow–St. Petersburg railway, studying the sleepers separately or the rails separately - the whole process is destroyed. A cell is not a jar with a solution, but a surprisingly complex system where molecules, especially large molecules, move thanks to special transport systems.
The transporters that we are developing for medicines are almost universal, it is a kind of platform. They can deliver different medications, and thus can treat different, including oncological diseases.
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