Lauren Dempsey, MS in Biomedicine and Law, RN, FISM News 

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Israeli researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have worked with researchers from South Korea to create a cancer treatment that helps boost chemo-immunotherapy in cancers that are typically resistant to chemotherapy as well as immunotherapy. The research was published in January in the journal Advanced Materials. This drug delivery system is the first of its kind and is based on lipid nanoparticles that are able to target very specific cells. This has the potential to be a game changer in providing personalized cancer treatment to patients. 

Dr. Ron Lahav, General Manager and Chief Operations Officer of Quiet Therapeutics, described that the novel drug-delivery system uses “GAGomers” which is a type of nanoparticle that is coated with glycosaminoglycan, a poly sugar, that targets cancer cells based on specific biomarkers present in tissue. Dr. Lahav explains that these nanoparticles are essentially a “Trojan Horse” carrying the drug that will destroy cancer cells and deliver it undetected.

Dr. Lahav explained that “a hallmark of cancer is cell replication.” He added, “The aim of most chemotherapeutic drugs is to thwart the replication machinery in cancer cells. The problem is that these drugs are not targeted, and therefore are not delivered efficiently to the tumors.”

However, this could change with this new drug-delivery system. According to Dr. Lahav, this “technology is very versatile. It is capable of encapsulating a broad range of therapeutic payloads. This versatility opens the door to a whole new class of DNA- and RNA-based therapeutics, which have great promise, but thus far have not reached their full potential.” It works by performing two specific tasks, which are to improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy as well as boost the immune system to be able to destroy cancer cells, helping combat chemo-resistant types of cancer.

Professor Dan Peer, TAU Vice President for Research and Development, explained how a previous discovery helped researchers to create this treatment. An enzyme called HO1 is found in drug-resistant cancer and is used by cancer cells to essentially hide from treatment. However, this new technology allows a single nanoparticle to “increase the sensitivity of cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy, while also reinvigorating immune cells and increasing their sensitivity to cancer cells. Thus, with one precisely targeted nanoparticle, we provide two different treatments at very different sites.”

The nano drug that scientists at TAU created has the ability to target cancer cells, neutralize the enzyme while also being able to “expose the tumor to chemotherapy, without causing any damage to surrounding healthy cells.” Peer also explained that “the same nanoparticle goes on to the T-cells of the immune system and reprograms them to identify cancer cells.”

Researchers were able to test their drug-delivery system in two different types of models, one for metastasized melanoma and for a locally sold tumor, both resulting in positive effects. 

Professor Peer and his colleagues are hopeful about the potential for this new technology, saying, “This is the first instance of a single drug based on an RNA-loaded nanoparticle doing two very different, even opposite jobs,” and added, “This is only an initial study, but it has enormous potential in the ongoing fight against cancer.”