Gold Innovations Blog

The awful side effects experienced by patients when undergoing chemotherapy treatments for cancer are well known. These side effects arise because the powerful anti-cancer drugs don’t just target the cancer cells, unfortunately they also hit healthy cells. Overcoming this problem is a major focus of many research groups working in the cancer field.

Brown University chemists have created a twin nanoparticle that specifically targets the Her-2-positive tumor cell, a type of malignant cell that affects up to 30 % of breast cancer patients and unloads the cancer-fighting drug cisplatin directly into the infected cell. (See image above, Credit: Chenjie Xu, Shouheng Sun/Brown University)

The researchers created the twin nanoparticle by binding one gold nanoparticle with an iron-oxide nanoparticle. On one end, they attached a synthetic protein antibody to the iron-oxide nanoparticle and on the other they attached cisplatin to the gold nanoparticle.

In laboratory tests, the gold-iron oxide nanoparticle combination successfully targeted the cancer cells and released the anti-cancer drugs into the malignant cells, killing the cells in up to 80 percent of cases.