DRUG- FILLED ‘ NANOCARRIERS’ CAN TARGET TUMOURS

Berlin, July 23: Scientists have developed miniature drug- filled “nano- submarines” that can latch on to immune cells and empower them to attack tumours without damaging healthy tissue.

In modern medicine, patients receiving medication to treat tumours or for pain therapy are often given drugs that disperse throughout the entire body, even though the section of the organ to be treated may be only small and clearly demarcated.

One solution would be to administer drugs that target specific cell types. Such nanocarriers are just what scientists are working to develop. These contain, in a manner of speaking, miniature submarines no larger than a thousandth of the diameter of a human hair.

Invisible to the naked eye, these nanocarriers are loaded with a pharmacologically-active agent, allowing them to function as concentrated transport containers.

The surface of these nanocarriers or drug capsules is specially coated to enable them, for example, to dock on to tissue interspersed with tumour cells.

The coating is usually composed of antibodies that act much like address labels to seek out binding sites on the target cells.

“Up to now, we have always had to use elaborate chemical methods to bind these antibodies to nanocapsules," said Volker Mailander,