“Targeted polymerised nanoparticle drugs will be available soon,” said Dr Omid Farokhzad, associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston at the annual Emtech meet jointly organised by Technological Review, MIT’s Industrial Liason Programme and Cybermedia at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore.
Farokhzad has designed a drug, ‘BIND-014’, which has undergone a human clinical trial. Chemotherapy drugs kill normal cells along with tumour cells, causing many side effects. Targeted drug delivery is a method in which the drug molecule will recognise tumour or cancer cells and release the drug only there.
A nanoparticle is one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Nanoparticles can be tagged to a drug, and the drug can be manipulated at will.
Different nanoparticles may behave differently, owing to their physicochemical nature. Some act by giving signals when they reach diseased tissues, and this brings other nanoparticles to the spot for the battle. Others help make molecules ‘invisible’ to the immune system till they reach cancer cells.
There are some nanoparticles which release the medicine only when they reach the cancer cells. Some can release chemicals only in certain conditions. They can be tagged to a drug to make it more efficient and lead to lesser side effects.
“Various types of nanoparticles, like saccharide-based, polymeric, magnetic, solid lipid, dendrimer-based and aerosol-based nanoparticles, have been explored due to their chemical stability and bio-compatibility — they are stable in environmental conditions and do not have any toxic effects or release toxic degradation products in the cells,” says Dr Dhirendra Bahadur, scientist at IIT, Mumbai, who works on nanoparticles and drug delivery.
He said, “In India, research on nanoparticle drugs is conducted in laboratory dishes and animals, but the drugs have not yet reached the market. Clinical trials have a lot of ethical requirements and have not yet been held. IITB will sign an MoU with the Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Centre in a week. We will hold a few animal trials first with targeted nanoparticle drugs and then go to clinical trials. We are hoping for some positive results.”
Dr Komal PC, neurologist, Narayana Hrudayalaya, Bangalore, said, “Most nanoparticle cancer therapies are at an experimental stage. A Centre for Excellence in Nanoparticle Research in Cancer Therapeutics will come up at Narayana Hrudayalaya soon with a grant from Vision Group. The three-year programme is a collaboration between the industry and Dr Dhirendra Bahadur at IIT, Mumbai. They will work on cancers in brain and their treatment by magnetic nanoparticles.”
“Nanoparticle drug therapy in cancer is still at experimental stage,” says Dr M Vijay Kumar, Director of Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology, Bangalore.
He expressed hope that the drug delivery application of nanomaterials would pass the clinical trial stages and move to commercialisation and clinical use in the next decade.