Iron Nanorobots Show their True Mettle
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
By combining low-power magnetic fields, which agitates nanowires, with laser heating and drug delivery, target [cancer] cells can be killed efficiently.
[...]Iron was the obvious material to make the nanowires, says Ji1/4rgen Kosel, who leads the group at KAUST, which includes Jasmeen Merzaban and Boon Ooi, and who co-led the work with researchers from CIC biomaGUNE in San Sebastian, Spain.
[...]Applying low-power magnetic fields, the team agitated the nanowires in a way that opened the membrane of target cells, inducing cell death.
[...]core-shell nanowires strongly absorb near-infrared light, heating up as they do so. Because light at this wavelength can penetrate far into the body, the nanowires could be heated using lasers directed at the tumor site. "The core-shell nanowires showed an extremely high photothermal conversion efficiency of more than 80 percent, which translated into a large intracellular heat dose," Martinez-Banderas says.
Finally, the anticancer drug doxorubicin was attached to the nanowires via pH-sensitive linkers. As the tumor environment is typically more acidic than healthy tissue, the linker selectively degraded in or near tumor cells, releasing the drug where it is needed. "The combination of treatment resulted in nearly complete cancer cell ablation and was more effective than individual treatments or the anticancer drug alone," Martinez-Banderas says.
Journal Reference:
Martinez-Banderas, A. I., Aires, A., Quintanilla, M., Holguin-Lerma, J. A., Lozano-Pedraza, C., Teran, F.J., Moreno, J.A., Perez, J.E., Ooi, B.S., Ravasi, T., Merzaban, J.S., Cortajarena, A.L. & Kosel, J. Iron-based corea'shell nanowires for combinatorial drug delivery and photothermal and magnetic therapy. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 11, 43976-43988 (2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsami.9b17512 - article
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