A spherical nanoparticle – now with a creamy lethal chemo drug center (Image from Stanford University)
One of the traits of cancerous and other diseased cells is that they overproduce proteins called cell surface receptors, which dot the outsides of cells. Receptors, as their name suggests, receive things, like hormones, which bind to the receptors and cause a change inside the cell. Receptors can also be just a thing to latch on to.
If you’re a cancer biologist or an oncologist and you want to kill a cancer cell, these receptors are like handle bars. The more handle bars dotting the cell’s surface, the easier it is for drugs and other killing agents to get a grip on the misbehaving cells. A slew of studies currently underway are looking at whether all these handle bars actually make the cells better targets. For death.
One approach is to attach a lethal chemotherapy drug to a ligand. (A ligand is any molecule a receptor will accept.)
The idea is that the drug will selectively bind to cancer cells and occasionally to healthy cells. But chemo drugs will be far more likely to attack cancer cells. A benefit of this approach is that theoretically, you could expose the patient to fewer chemo drugs, since you could use less of them to achieve the desired effect.
Another approach is to create nanoparticles, synthetic constructs filled with chemo drugs, which are coated in ligands to an over-expressed cancer cell surface receptor.
Here, scientists envisage the nanoparticles will preferentially bind to cancer cells (and maybe ONLY to cancer cells), and release their lethal payloads in the immediate vicinity of cancer cells, killing them.
Neither of these approaches has been proven to work yet.
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