Gold Innovations Blog

Many of you will probably have heard of Cisplatin, which is an effective platinum-based chemotherapy drug used in the treatment of a range of cancers. As with many cancer drugs, it does have a number of side-effects which can limit its use so ways of improving its delivery, and potentially lessening any side-effects, have long been sought.

This paper, recently published in JACS, describes attempts to do just that. The team, which was led by Chad Mirkin at Northwestern and Stephen Lippard at MIT, have attached a cisplatin prodrug to gold nanoparticles. The action of introducing these nanoparticles into cancer cells facilitated the reductive release of cisplatin from the prodrug, and the subsequent formation of a highly cytotoxic platinum complex. In some cases this complex was shown to be more cytotoxic than cisplatin alone, with the added bonus of having reduced platinum-associated toxicity.