Taking their inspiration from insect swarms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigators have devised a nanoparticle based communication signal amplification system that could be used to target tumours, reports Nature Materials.

Medicines utilising nanotechnology - defined as a small object that behaves as a whole unit in terms of its transport and properties - are recognised as having great potential to improve on the precision of cancer therapy.

Advances in nanotechnology have produced devices with the ability to encapsulate and programmably release target therapeutics.  However, the ability of systems to home the therapeutic material to regions of disease has been limited.

Inspired by the ability of biological systems to improve targeting, such as the recruitment of inflammatory cells to sites of disease, platelet self-assembly and insect swarming  Sangeeta Bhatia and colleagues from MIT (Cambridge,  MA, USA)  set about designing a two part  nanoparticle system that would first target tumours and then broadcast the tumour’s location to receiving nanoparticles in the circulation that deliver the  therapeutic agent.

The team used multiple signaling modules, with one system using signaling modules that had been developed to bind to receptors on tumour blood vessels; with the signaling modules then activating a cascade by enzymatically triggering the extrinsic coagulation cascade upon receptor binding.

A second approach is to convert externally applied near-infrared energy into heat thereby causing local injury to the tumour. Both approaches are able to communicate the tumour’s location to receiving modules in the blood stream which can target multiple features of the cascades to more efficiently find tumour location.

In a mouse implanted with human carcinoma the investigators were able to show that the communications system induced prolonged inhibition of the tumour , and was able to target over 40 times higher doses of chemotherapeutics than non-communicating controls. 

“The power of this paper is that we’ve demonstrated the concept that synthetic therapeutic and diagnostic systems can be designed to do things like communicate with one another to more efficiently find and treat disease,” says Geoffrey von Maltzahn, the first author of the paper.  “This is a first step that we hope will ultimately lead to new designs that improve the diagnosis and treatment of focal diseases by emulating the way our own immune cells communicate to more effectively track down and treat regions of disease.”

Reference: G von Maltzahn, j Ho Park, KY Lin, et al. Nanoparticles that communicate in vivo to amplify tumour targeting. Nature Materials. DOI: 10.1038/NMAT3049