Bursting cancer-seeking microbubbles to deliver deadly drugs
Engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a technique that uses microbubbles and ultrasound to help relatively large cancer drugs enter tumor cells and cause them to self-destruct.
Dubbed “Sonoporation-assisted Precise Intracellular Nanodelivery”—or SonoPIN for short—the technology caused 50% of targeted cancer cells in a benchtop experiment to self-destruct, while leaving 99% of non-targeted cells healthy. The results show promise for precisely delivering a wide variety of large-molecule therapeutics to cells with few off-target effects.
The research appears online March 13 in the journal Proceedings ...