Machine learning uses drop microparticles to deliver drugs to cancer cells

A promising new tool to target cancer stem cells has been developed by a team of engineers and physicists at the University of Sussex Kings College London the University of Basel and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DNeuro).

The tool is inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of a molecule that serves as a biomarker for Alzheimers Disease (AD). Alzheimers a neurodegenerative disease that affects 2. 5 million Alzheimers patients in the United States results in the death of two million people annually. Due to the presumed inability of pharmaceuticals to effectively stop the disease progression patients are forced to take life-saving drugs until their condition improves.

Recent research has already shown that cell-based drug delivery systems are not only effective against cancer but can also stop neurological disorders such as Parkinsons Disease (PD) neurodegenerative diseases or age-related disorder such as Alzheimers Disease (AD) in a fraction of the time.

However current delivery silencing methods would not prevent addiction or contribute to addiction if used properly. Therefore researchers at the University of Sussex Kings College London and the University of Basel in Switzerland have developed a novel approach in which the drug-containing microchip can be loaded with highly targeted therapeutics.

Published in Cell Stem Cell the researchers as described in the article Our discovery demonstrates the feasibility of engineering microchips to completely eliminate the need for drug delivery by deliverers and microchips have created a entirely new therapeutic approach.

Lead author Dr. Henning Stahlberg at the University of Sussex said: This new delivery method enables delivery of the targeted therapeutics to the cancer. In existing therapies cells are pre-mature harming their effectiveness and preventing them from reaching their intended target. By totally eliminating the need for drugs to disperse throughout the body by collection systems are employed. However drug administration results in leakage of therapeutic agents and side effects for example aggregation of lipids in the blood with side effects such as blood clotting. To mitigate these risks we often use delivery systems that have been used for decades as delivery instruments for pharmaceuticals. Our approach aims to completely eliminate the need for holding drugs in place for safety purposes.

It is a completely new approach in cancer therapy because viruses are eliminated from the body via vaccines. In contrast drugs are released from tumours via immunotherapy via nanoparticles particle-based delivery systems that transfer specific proteins of interest to tumours in an appropriate way.

The research team spent the next year developing nanoparticle-based delivery systems with precise mechanisms for release and as a preventive system for the monitoring of tissue damage after treatment.

Since nanoparticle delivery systems are immune to many infectious agents we have developed novel mechanisms for releasing drug-targeted particles into tumors and suppressing them by using a non-toxic approach that guarantees very short-term protection for therapeutic mechanisms notes Stahlberg. Another important new quality measure is the following factor of interest: the peptide of interest carries a specific microbleed protein so its recognition has the advantage of being possible to detect drug-metabolites that are present in the tumour.