New nanoparticle 'cluster bombs' could make chemotherapy less toxic.

Chemotherapy is one of the key weapons in our fight against cancer, but it comes with a whole host of unwanted side effects and damage to the surrounding, healthy areas of the body. So an international team of researchers has come up with what they think could be a much less toxic way of delivering the treatment, and it's based around 'cluster bombs' of nanoparticles.

The new procedure is designed to improve the delivery of the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. It works using tiny nanoparticles, just 100 nanometres wide, which are loaded with drugs and transported to the tumor site through blood vessels. Once they reach their destination, the acidic environment around the cancer cells causes them to break up into 5-nanometre-wide particles, which can then move inside the tumor cells.

At this point, the cisplatin can do its work from inside the tumor cells, damaging the cancerous DNA to effectively kill them off. To give you some idea of the scale, you can fit a million nanometres inside a millimetre.

In tests on lab mice, the teams from Emory University in the US and the University of Science and Technology of China found that the concentration of cisplatin that reached the tumors was seven times higher than normal. And if more of the drug is reaching its intended target, that means less of it is leaking out into the rest of the body, so unwanted side effects are reduced.

Video source: New nanoparticle 'cluster bombs' could make chemotherapy less toxic.

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Clinical Trial Risks

Clinical trials are research studies designed to answer a specific question which would then serve to improve current medical care. These studies focus on which medical treatment works best for a specific population of people with a certain disease. Usually a clinical trial is developed after there is some pre-clinical success or promising results in studies done in the laboratory.

Clinical trials are usually categorized as phase I, phase II or phase III. Phase I studies are done very early in drug development and usually focus on patient safety and trying to find the right dose that is tolerable. Later-phase studies tend to be more disease-specific and may compare an investigational treatment approach to the standard of care to see if there is any benefit with the new treatment.

Each clinical trial has its own inclusion and exclusion criteria. This helps make sure there is uniformity within the trial and that there are no outside factors which could influence the outcome of the study. Clinical trials help improve medical care and are necessary when seeking FDA approval for use within the general population.

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Clinical Trial Risks

Source: wtop.com