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Nanotechnology Tackles Brain Cancer

March 22nd, 2010 by admin | Filed under Cancer


Brain cancer can be counted among the most deadly and intractable diseases. Often diagnosed after a patient exhibits symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, uncharacteristic behavior changes, or paralysis, the growing mass of a brain tumor will continue to squeeze out normal tissue and degrade the brain’s function if left untreated. But treatment is elusive. Tumors may be embedded in regions of the brain that are critical to orchestrating the body’s vital functions, while they shed cells to invade other parts of the brain, forming more tumors too small to detect using conventional imaging techniques. Brain cancer’s location and ability to spread quickly makes treatment with surgery or radiation like fighting an enemy hiding out among minefields and caves, and explains why the term “brain cancer” is all too often associated with the word “inoperable.”

Making treatment even more challenging, there is a system of blood vessels and protective cells in the brain — the blood brain barrier — that admits only essential nutrients and oxygen, and keeps out everything else, including about 95 percent of all drugs. This natural barrier puts serious limits on how much a patient can benefit from traditional chemotherapy and new cancer drugs.

In an ideal situation, we would have a “smart” drug that could cross the blood brain barrier, zero in on the cancer cells, mark their location clearly for surgery, or destroy them with such precision that it would leave surrounding, normal brain cells intact. Until now, such a scenario seemed so far-fetched. But using nanotechnology, NCI-supported researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Virginia Commonwealth University are creating ultra small particles that can target and destroy cancer cells in the brain, even those in tumors too small to be removed surgically.

Among the properties of nanoparticles that make them ideal candidates for recognizing and treating brain cancer, their ability to deliver a wide variety of payloads across the blood-brain barrier is perhaps the most important. Understanding how some nanoparticles achieve this special “permission” to enter the brain requires a closer look at how the blood-brain barrier works.

The blood-brain barrier permits the exchange of essential nutrients and gases between the bloodstream and the brain, while blocking larger entities such as microbes, immune cells and most drugs from entering. This barrier system is a perfectly logical arrangement, since the brain is the most sensitive and complex organ in the human body and it would not make sense for it to become the battleground of infection and immune response.

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