Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D. director of the IMM Research Center
for NanoMedicine. Photo by George Craig
Scientists are building nanoparticles designed to find and kill cancer-causing cells before they have a chance to spread, said Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D, director of The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM), during a March talk on “Nanotechnology and Medicine” presented by the Houston Seminar lecture series.
Nanomedicine, an offshoot of nanotechnology, refers to highly specific medical intervention at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissue. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. It is at this size scale – about 100 nanometers or less – that biological molecules and structures inside living cells operate.
“It’s hard to stop the progression of cancer once it gets to a certain level,” said Ferrari, who has authored more than 150 scientific papers, earned more than 20 U.S. and international patents and been awarded $26 million in grant funding since 1990. “We want to stop the tumor at the precancerous stage so it can’t grow into metastatic mode.”
Nanoparticles have already been enlisted in the war against cancer, said Ferrari, who is also president of the Alliance for NanoHealth, a collaborative venture of Houston research institutions that includes the UT Health Science Center. Nanoparticles are nanoscale capsules which can carry therapeutic or imaging enhancement agents. Invisible to the eye, nanoparticles can also be designed to perform certain functions.
Examples of nanoparticles include:
- liposomes, tiny fat bubbles that can be loaded with medication and circulated through the blood;
- nanoshells, balls which destroy tumors when heated with laser light;
- dendrimers, macromolecules that can deliver medication;
- carbon nanotubes, seamless cylinders with diameters of the order of a nanometer discovered by Richard Smalley, the late Nobel Prize winner from Rice University; and
- silicon-based micro/nano particles and devices, pioneered by Ferrari.
Liposomes are used to deliver doxorubicin, a medication to fight ovarian cancer. Capsules are coated with hair-like strands made from a type of rubber to evade detection and destruction by the body’s immune system. A formulation of a human protein, Albumin, is used to deliver a nanoparticle of a breast cancer medication, paclitaxel.
“Most of these drugs are for general systemic injection,” said Ferrari. “An ideal therapeutic system would be selectively directed against cell clusters that are in the early stages of the transformation towards a malignancy.”
The challenge is to deliver the medication directly to the cancer causing cells and to avoid injuring the surrounding cells, said Ferrari. “The realization of such a system faces formidable challenges, including the identification of suitable early markers of neoplastic disease, and understanding their evolution over time; the deployment of these markers in screening and early detection protocols; and the development of technology for the biomarker-targeted delivery of multiple therapeutic agents, and for the simultaneous capability of avoiding biological and biophysical barriers,” he said.
The focus of the IMM’s Research Center for NanoMedicine is on inter-disciplinary research to combine nano-engineering, mathematical modeling and biomedical sciences to develop nanotechnology enabled therapeutic and diagnostic platforms for combating diseases including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and infectious diseases. Ferrari encourages collaboration among the center’s staff of 30, as well as with researchers from other institutions.
To that end, he has started a new company called Leonardo BioSystems Inc., focusing on nanotechnology-based cancer therapeutics by integrating Ferrari’s technologies with others from leading research institutions. “The only way to win is through a team,” Ferrari said.
— Rob Cahill, Institutional Advancement
Date Posted: 04/02/2007
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