At the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion, an automatic system was developed to create a "nanometric package" for sending drugs to cancer centers in the body
Researchers at the Technion have developed an automatic system for the design and preparation of stabilizing materials to produce a "nanometric case" - a platform for sending drugs to cancer centers in the body. In an article in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers report that using the innovative system they developed materials to create such a platform and even demonstrated, in preclinical experiments, their effectiveness in solid cancerous tumors.
The research was conducted at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering under the leadership of doctoral student Yuval Haris and laboratory director Dr. Hagit Sasson-Baor in the laboratory of Dr. Yossi Shamai for anticancer nanomedicine and nanoinformatics.
Chemotherapy drugs contain specific toxins designed to eliminate cancer cells. One of the problems with conventional chemotherapy treatments is that less than one percent of the medicinal substance reaches its destination - the cancer cells themselves.
The rest of the substance is dispersed in the body and also damages healthy tissues. This results in the well-known side effects - nausea (as a result of damage to the intestinal tissue) and hair loss - and even more serious effects.
The chemotherapy damage to healthy tissues is the background for the development of dedicated "packaging" - nanometer capsules that carry the drug to the target and release it there while preventing its leakage into healthy tissues. About 40 nanomedicine products, including Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for the corona virus, have already been approved by the FDA, but the development of such transport capsules is a complex technological challenge, and therefore many research groups are working on their improvement.
In an article in Biomaterials, Technion researchers present a breakthrough in this topic: an automated process for developing optimal materials for the creation of these capsules. The system developed by the Technion is used both as a robot-chemist that synthesizes new substances and as a robot-pharmacist that prepares them into nanocapsules that contain the anti-cancer drug.
"The technology we developed," explains Dr. Shamai, "is based on an interesting phenomenon called AIE - light emission based on the drug's state of aggregation. This effect means that in its solid, or aggregated form, it emits a lot of light energy, but when it is soluble or stable in a capsule, it emits almost no light. Out of about 40 drugs we tested, we found ten new drugs in which this effect occurs."
The automatic system developed at the Technion makes it possible to know, according to the light energy emitted from the drug, which substance creates the best nanoparticles for that drug. This method led to the discovery of a new stabilizing material whose properties give it many advantages over the existing materials used to create nanometric capsules for drug delivery. The researchers discovered that the new material is superior to the existing materials in various aspects, including efficiency, safety, the uniformity of the particles that make it up, stability over time and the number of drugs that can be "wrapped" and stabilized with it. All of these make it a super stabilizer suitable for the ever-expanding field of treatment using nanoscale capsules.
The new material, 595R, was created in a green chemical reaction, meaning a reaction that does not require the use of polluting and toxic organic solvents. It demonstrates a very high efficiency (90%) of drug loading and allows predicting the effectiveness of the treatment. In the pre-clinical trials, the effectiveness of the capsule based on it was demonstrated in the treatment of solid tumors resulting from a mutation common in lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and intestinal cancer.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Ministry of Health. The researchers thank Victoria Zelovin from the Preclinical Research Authority at the Technion.
for the article in the journal biomaterials
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