Gold rods used to ‘break cancer’s legs’
pharmafile | June 28, 2017 | News story | Research and Development | Cancer, Georgia Tech, nanorods
A study emerging from Georgia Tech has found a new way of stopping metastasising cancer’s spread through the body. The team used gold rods and low-energy laser to effectively burn away the protrusions that allow cancer cells to move through the body.
The cytoskeletons of cells form filopodia, which extend out from fibres called lamellipodia, and allow healthy cells shift position within tissue. However, in cancer cells the filopodia overproduce and allow the cells to move through the body.
In the team’s research, led by Mostafa El-Sayed, one of the world’s most highly decorated chemists, they specifically targeted these protrusions to determine whether their destruction would prevent the spread of cancer cells.
To achieve this, the team used gold nanorods coated with RGD-peptides that were designed to stick to a cell protein called integrin. This alone interfered with the cancer cells ability to metastasise, as it blocked the function to overproduce lamellipodia and filopodia. It also meant that this part of the therapy could be targeted, as specific integrins are found more frequently in cancer cells.
The second phase of the treatment was to heat the gold rods that were attached to the cancer cells. The team did this via a low-energy laser of near-infrared light. The light was not absorbed by healthy cells but the gold nanorods did, allowing them to heat up to damage the cancer cells. This is the point at which the study claims to ‘break cancer’s legs’.
“The light was not absorbed by the cells, but the gold nanorods absorbed it, and as a result, they heated up and partially melted cancer cells they are connected with, mangling lamellipodia and filopodia,” Moustafa Ali, first author of the study, said. “It didn’t kill all the cells, not in this experiment. If we killed them, we would not have been able to observe whether we stopped them from migrating or not.”
As mentioned by Ali, there is potential for the treatment to be used beyond stopping the cancer cells from metastasising. It could also potentially be used to destroy the entire cell and, because of the lack of damage to surrounding cells, it could be used repeatedly until tumour sites were completely destroyed.
There is also the potential to use the therapy immediately prior to further treatment simply to prevent cancer cells spreading through the body – making it easier to manage further spread of the cells.
In terms of safety, the use of the laser was not associated with any long-term health effects, and the gold nanorods were found to be deposited in the liver and spleen. The study had been undertaken in mice and there were no observable signs of toxicity from the gold 15 months after treatment.
Ben Hargreaves
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