IIT GUWAHATI SCIENTISTS DEVELOP A STRATEGY TO DELIVER CHEMOTHERAPEUTIC DRUGS SPECIFICALLY TO CANCER CELLS

The developed approach would allow the development of drug carriers for chemotherapy with enhanced efficacy and negligible side effects. Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati researchers have developed a new strategy to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs specifically to the cancerous cells in a patient’s body. The pathbreaking results of this research have been published in prestigious journals of The Royal Society of Chemistry including ‘Chemical Communications’ and ‘Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry’. The research papers have been co-authored by Prof. Debasis Manna, Department of Chemistry, IIT Guwahati, along with his research scholars Mr. Subhasis Dey, Ms. Anjali Patel, and Mr. Biswa Mohan Prusty, among others. Anticancer activities were carried out in collaboration with Prof. Siddhartha Sankar Ghosh and Ms. Plaboni Sen from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and Prof. Arindam Bhattacharyya and Mr. Soumya Chatterjee from Calcutta University.

A part of the ongoing research was recently highlighted as the cover page of Chemical Communications. The problem with existing chemotherapeutic drugs is that they kill healthy cells of the body in addition to cancerous cells, leading to numerous undesirable side effects. In fact, it is believed that cancer deaths are as much due to the side effects of chemotherapy as the disease itself. There is worldwide research to overcome the drawbacks of secondary toxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs. Some strategies that are being explored include targetspecific delivery of the drugs and ondemand delivery of appropriate drug doses to cancerous cells/tissues. Explaining his research Prof. Debasis Manna, Department of Chemistry, IIT Guwahati, said, “We have two needs in the development of chemotherapy drugs – the drug must be targeted at the cancer cells, the drug must be released by an external trigger whenever it is required,”

To meet the above needs, the molecule developed by the research team has four special features.

• The first feature is that the molecules assemble to form hollow spherical shells in water These shells that are ten-millionth of a meter in size can be used as a minuscule container for the drug molecule

• The second characteristic is that the molecule has a part (the acetazolamide ligand) that specifically binds to cancer cells and not normal cells

• The third feature of the molecule is that it has a photocleavable linker moiety that is responsive to infrared light and breaks the shell when exposed to IR

• Molecule also contain a dye moiety (cyanine-3) which is also useful for both fluoresce and scattering-based imaging to visually monitor the entire process.