Gold nanotherapy could beat brain cancer

Researchers from the University of Cambridge (UC), UK have successfully developed a treatment for brain cancer using gold nanoparticles to help deliver chemotherapy medicine more efficiently to diseased cells.

A full account of the study has been published in the journal Nanoscale.

Though testing is still in its infancy, the researchers are confident that the technique could be perfected to treat glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) - widely seen as the most common and aggressive brain tumour in adults, and notoriously difficult to treat.

“Subsequent testing in patients is eminently feasible using the infrastructure that we already have in place in Cambridge

UC professor Sir Mark Welland

Described as a ’Trojan horse’ treatment, the gold nanoparticles are exposed to radiotherapy once inside the tumour cells.

The radiotherapy caused the gold nanoparticles to emit a type of low energy electron, known as Auger electrons, capable of damaging the diseased cell’s DNA and other intracellular molecules, thereby enhancing the impact of the chemotherapy drug, the researchers said.

Although further work needs to be conducted before the technology can be considered for use in humans, the lab-based tests, which used tumour cells that had been taken from GBM patients, were so effective that after 20 days, there was no sign of revival, suggesting the tumour cells had been destroyed.

Professor of Nanotechnology at St John’s College, UC, and study leader, Sir Mark Welland said: “The combined therapy that we have devised appears to be incredibly effective in the live cell culture.”

Welland, who has stressed the fact that this technology is not a cure, said it demonstrates what nanotechnology can achieve in fighting these aggressive cancers. Welland also said this technique could be developed further to deliver multiple types of drugs.

“By combining this strategy with cancer cell-targeting materials, we should be able to develop a therapy for GBM and other challenging cancers in the future.”

What makes this treatment unique is its ability to attack tumour cells in the brain with significant effectiveness - especially considering the virtual inoperability of GBM tumours.

“We need to be able to hit the cancer cells directly with more than one treatment at the same time,” said clinician scientists Colin Watts, who worked on the study.

“Nanotechnology provides the opportunity to give the cancer cells this ’double whammy’ and open up new treatment options in the future,” Watts said.

Unfortunately, the gold nanoparticles alone were found to cause significant cell damage. However, treatment-resistant cell populations did eventually recover several days after the radiotherapy treatment.

To accomodate this issue, researchers had to engineer a secondary nanostructure which was suffused with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin, which worked alongside the gold nanoparticles to combat GBM-infected cells in the brain.

Asked about the likelihood of scaling-up this treatment for use in human trial, Welland said: “We need proof-of-concept in vivo before we get too excited.

“We have the technology to do this using a patient-derived xenogeneic (PDX) platform. That said, cell-based assays are the mainstay in the pharma industry.”

Though scaling-up production of the nanotechnology with GMP standard quality assurance is likely to take two to three years, Welland is confident a phase I safety study, in a small number of patients with deep-seated tumours that are currently extremely challenging to treat, will be highly likely in the near future.

“Subsequent testing in patients is eminently feasible using the infrastructure that we already have in place in Cambridge. We already have the hardware for intracerebral delivery, for example,” Welland told LaboratoryTalk.