(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study in mice hints at the potential to use tiny particles made with RNA molecules to deliver chemotherapy drugs and other therapies directly to tumors, killing cancer cells without generating an immune response or toxicity-related side effects.
Researchers constructed tiny molecular clusters called RNA micelles, loaded them with potent chemo drugs and an RNA molecule that blocks cancer survival, and placed a tumor targeting molecule on their outer wall that attaches to receptors on cancer cell surfaces to enhance delivery.
Treatment with these RNA micelles almost completely depleted metastatic colorectal cancer tumors in mouse lungs within 26 days. The tumors in mice mimicked colorectal cancer that metastasizes to the lung in humans, which comes with a poor prognosis: Only 16.2% of patients survive five years after diagnosis.
“Developing RNA therapeutic technology is key to treating colorectal cancer lung metastasis because there is no cure,” said senior study author Peixuan Guo, Sylvan G. Frank Endowed Chair professor in the Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmacology at The Ohio State University. “We’ve developed a nanoparticle that can treat it efficiently without toxicity – the particle spontaneously targets the cancer and no toxicity is detected.”
The study was published Jan. 20 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
The research coincides with a Nature Protocols publication from Guo’s lab published Feb. 3, in which he and colleagues provide detailed instructions on how to construct RNA nanoparticles for targeted delivery of therapeutics combined in one package to produce synergistic treatment effects.
The scientists describe Lego-like architectural structures composed mainly of versatile RNA molecules that have rubber-like properties, all factors that foster cooperation with the body and, as a result, enabling spontaneous tumor targeting and rapid excretion by the kidneys.
“The main idea of the micelle studies is that we can literally prove part of the idea we talk about in the Nature Protocols paper,” said Kai Jin, first author of the colorectal cancer study and a PhD student in Guo’s lab. “The micelle paper is an example of how a different kind of RNA nanoparticle can be achieved.”
In the study, the researchers doubled the cancer-killing power of the RNA micelles by combining multiple copies of the chemo drug gemcitabine with a molecule called a small interfering RNA to silence the gene encoding for survivin, resulting in treatment of the colon cancer lung metastasis and termination of cancer cell growth, respectively.
“It’s a two-pronged approach. The chemotherapy is killing the cells and the small interfering RNA is blocking survival gene expression,” said co-author Daniel Binzel, a research assistant professor of pharmaceutics and pharmacology at Ohio State. “The two together help kill the cells in multiple different pathways.”
The team also attached a molecule called a ligand to the micelles to enhance their attraction to receptors on cancer cell surfaces.
The team initially found in cell culture experiments that delivering gemcitabine and survivin siRNA packaged together in micelles induced DNA damage and programmed cell death in a human colorectal cancer cell line.
In the animal experiments, a six-dose micelle therapy over three weeks started five days after mice were injected with metastatic colorectal cancer cells. Compared to the tumor status in groups of control mice receiving micelles containing either chemo or siRNA alone, the mice receiving micelles loaded with the combined therapeutics were nearly cancer-free. Attaching the ligand to the micelles significantly improved the tumor reduction.
Results showed the micelles attacked the cancer in two ways, accumulating in tumor blood vessels and entering the cells with the ligand’s help.
“We showed that one nanoparticle can carry a drug and therapeutic RNA at the same time, and also used an RNA ligand – these three things are put together so the particle recognizes the cancer cells, binds to them and delivers the particles into the cancer cells,” said Guo, also an investigator in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Publishing the RNA nanoparticle methodology in Nature Protocols, which publishes only protocols proven to work, comes almost four decades after Guo, as a student in the 1980s, published a paper in Science determining that short segments of noncoding RNA not only existed, but had important functions in cells.
“The recent boom of RNA therapeutics companies and the FDA approval of RNA therapeutics have indicated that my prediction that RNA was the third milestone of pharmaceutical drug development has been realized,” he said.
The work in both publications was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and an Ohio State President’s Research Excellence Catalyst Award.
Binzel is the first author of the Nature Protocols paper, co-authored by Guo, Jin and Tesla Yudhistira, all of Ohio State. Additional co-authors of the Advanced Functional Materials paper include Piotr Rychahou and Mark Evers of the University of Kentucky.
RNA Nanobiotics, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, holds exclusive global licenses to multiple patents covering RNA nanoparticle platforms for targeted cancer therapy and RNA exosome technologies developed by Guo at Ohio State and the University of Kentucky.
#
Contact: Peixuan Guo, Guo.1091@osu.edu
Written by Emily Caldwell, Caldwell.151@osu.edu; 614-292-8152
END
Materials scientists have long sought to enhance the durability of thermal/environmental barrier coatings (T/EBCs) under extreme conditions, particularly against corrosion caused by calcium‑magnesium‑alumino‑silicate (CMAS) melts. Understanding the corrosion mechanisms and accurately predicting the long‑term service life of coating materials remain critical challenges for aerospace and energy applications.
Recently, a research team from Harbin Institute of Technology and Shanghai University achieved a significant breakthrough. They designed two novel high‑entropy rare‑earth disilicates—(Er1/4Y1/4Lu1/4Yb1/4)2Si2O7 and ...
Invisible light beyond the range of human vision plays a vital role in communication technologies, medical diagnostics, and optical sensing. Ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths are routinely used in these fields, yet detecting them directly often requires complex instrumentation. Developing materials that can convert invisible light into visible signals could serve as essential components for measurement technologies and sensors, and play a major role in understanding the fundamental photophysical processes. However, developing those materials remains a key challenge in ...
Earth’s surface is covered by more than a dozen tectonic plates, and in subduction zones around the world—including the Japanese Islands—plates converge and dense oceanic plates sink into the Earth’s interior. These regions, especially plate boundaries, are known for frequent seismic activity. In recent years, scientists have increasingly emphasized that water plays a crucial role in earthquake phenomena in subduction zones, and thus conducted active research to investigate the influence of water on various processes occurring within earthquake source regions.
When water is supplied, peridotite—the primary constituent of ...
Early in the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” Dustin Hoffman, playing the character of Ratso Rizzo, crosses a Manhattan street and angrily bangs on the hood of an encroaching taxi. Hoffman’s line — “I’m walking here!” — has since been repeated by thousands of New Yorkers. Where cars and people mix, tensions rise.
And yet, governments and planners across the U.S. haven’t thoroughly tracked where it is that cars and people mix. Officials have long measured vehicle traffic closely while largely ignoring pedestrian traffic. Now, an MIT research group has assembled a routable dataset of sidewalks, ...
An AI-powered model developed at University of Michigan can read a brain MRI and diagnose a person in seconds, a study suggests.
The model detected neurological conditions with up to 97.5% accuracy and predicted how urgently a patient required treatment.
Researchers say the first-of-its-kind technology could transform neuroimaging at health systems across the United States.
The results are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“As the global demand for MRI rises and places significant strain our physicians and health systems, our AI model has potential to reduce burden by improving diagnosis and treatment with fast, accurate ...
Researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with international partners, have engineered a thin two-dimensional perovskite phase at the buried interface of three-dimensional (3D) perovskite solar cells (PSCs) to boost device performance and operational stability.
The method, published in Nature Energy on February 6, improves the crystallization quality of perovskite films and reduces defect concentrations at the buried interfaces by more than 90 percent (a tenfold ...
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have uncovered a strategy that triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) cells use to boost their ability to metastasize, or spread to other organs. Metastasis is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths and scientists are investigating ways to prevent it. These findings, published in Nature Communications, highlight new possibilities for developing clinical interventions to treat metastatic TNBC patients for whom there are no specific therapies.
“Metastasis occurs ...
A recent study, led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA and using modelling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The work, published in Nature Astronomy, provides new insights into how complex organic molecules and carbon are processed in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe.
The study focuses on IRAS 07251–0248, ...
The Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), in partnership with the scientific publisher Pensoft Publishers and famous science YouTuber Ze Frank, have let the Internet name a newly discovered deep-sea chiton (a type of marine mollusk). The formal description of the species was published today in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.
From over 8,000 name suggestions submitted via social media, the research team responsible for describing the species selected the name Ferreiraella populi. The specific epithet populi is a Latin singular noun in the genitive case meaning “of the people”. Curiously, the name was independently suggested by 11 different contributors ...
February 6, 2026 -- A UT San Antonio-led international research team has identified chitin, the primary organic component of modern crab shells and insect exoskeletons, in trilobite fossils more than 500 million years old, marking the first confirmed detection of the molecule in this extinct group.
The findings, led by Elizabeth Bailey, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at UT San Antonio, offer new insight into fossil preservation and Earth’s long-term carbon cycle.
Chitin is one of the most abundant organic polymers produced by life on Earth, second only to ...
