Blood-vessel cells can combat aggressive tumors, helping to prevent them from spreading through the body

MIT scientists have discovered that cells lining the blood vessels secrete molecules that suppress tumor growth and keep cancer cells from invading other tissues, a finding that could lead to a new way to treat cancer.

Elazer Edelman, professor in the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), says that implanting such cells adjacent to a patient’s tumor could shrink a tumor or prevent it from growing back or spreading further after surgery or chemotherapy. He has already tested such an implant in mice, and MIT has licensed the technology to Pervasis Therapeutics, Inc., which plans to test it in humans.

Edelman describes the work, which appears in the Jan. 19 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, as a “paradigm shift” that could fundamentally change how cancer is understood and treated. “This is a cancer therapy that could be used alone or with chemotherapy radiation or surgery, but without adding any devastating side effects,” he says.

read more at link http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/cancer-therapy-0120.html

Delivering a potent cancer drug with nanoparticles can lessen side effects
The new nanoparticle, which delivers the drug in a form activated when it reaches its target, also treats tumors more effectively than the unadorned drug in mice.

Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have shown that they can deliver the cancer drug cisplatin much more effectively and safely in a form that has been encapsulated in a nanoparticle targeted to prostate tumor cells and is activated once it reaches its target.

Using the new particles, the researchers were able to successfully shrink tumors in mice, using only one-third the amount of conventional cisplatin needed to achieve the same effect. That could help reduce cisplatin’s potentially severe side effects, which include kidney damage and nerve damage.

In 2008, the researchers showed that the nanoparticles worked in cancer cells grown in a lab dish. Now that the particles have shown promise in animals, the team hopes to move on to human tests.

At each stage, it’s possible there will be new roadblocks that will come up, but you just keep trying,” says Stephen Lippard, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry and a senior author of the paper, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 10.

Omid Farokhzad, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is also a senior author of the paper. Shanta Dhar, a postdoctoral associate in Lippard’s lab, and Nagesh Kolishetti, a postdoctoral associate in Farokhzad’s lab, are co-lead authors.

Better delivery

Cisplatin, which doctors began using to treat cancer in the late 1970s, destroys cancer cells by cross-linking their DNA, which ultimately triggers cell death. Despite its adverse side effects, which also include nerve damage and nausea, about half of all cancer patients receiving chemotherapy are taking Cisplatin or other platinum drugs.

Another problem with conventional cisplatin is its relatively short lifetime in the bloodstream. Only about 1 percent of the dose given to a patient ever reaches the tumor cells’ DNA, and about half of it is excreted within an hour of treatment.

read more at link http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/cancer-nanoparticle-0111.html

This next bit is utterly fascinating and was announced last night on Coast to Coast.

Aerospace and defense systems developer Sir Charles Shults discussed the latest developments in new energy sources, space exploration, and medical technology. It's an unfortunate fact "that most of the seminal and really cutting edge research is being done in other countries right now," rather than the US, he noted. Much of this is due to America's weakened economy, as well as litigation and laws surrounding what and how research can be conducted, such as with the stem cell controversy, he continued.

One interesting development that other countries have produced, said Shults, are modified inkjet printers that can actually culture cells (using a person's own Mesenchymal stem cells) and then "print organs layer by layer, which can then be grown or transplanted in people." Regarding energy sources, "oil may became superfluous sooner than we think because of orbital solar methods, and compact nuclear reactors," he detailed.