Guwahati, Sep 26: Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati (IIT-G) have developed a new strategy to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs, specifically to cancerous cells in a patient’s body.
The developed approach will allow development of drug carriers for chemotherapy with enhanced efficacy and negligible side effects, the researchers claim.
The path-breaking results of the research have been published in prestigious journals of The Royal Society of Chemistry, including ‘Chemical Communications’ and ‘Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry’.
The research papers have been co-authored by Debasis Manna, professor at the department of chemistry, IIT-G, along with his research scholars, Subhasis Dey, Anjali Patel and Biswa Mohan Prusty among others.
Anti-cancer activities were carried out in collaboration with Siddhartha Sankar Ghosh and Plaboni Sen from the IIT-G and Arindam Bhattacharyya and Soumya Chatterjee from Calcutta University.
A part of the ongoing research was recently highlighted as the cover page of Chemical Communications.
“The problem with the existing chemotherapeutic drugs is that they kill healthy cells of the body in addition to cancerous cells, leading to numerous undesirable side effects. In fact, it is believed that cancer deaths are as much due to the side effects of chemotherapy as the disease itself,” a statement from IIT-G said.
There is worldwide research to overcome the drawbacks of secondary toxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs. Some strategies that are being explored include target-specific delivery of the drugs and on-demand delivery of appropriate drug doses to cancerous cells/tissues.
Explaining his research, Manna said, “We have two needs in the development of chemotherapy drugs – the drug must be targeted at the cancer cells and the drug must be released by an external trigger whenever it is required,”
To meet these needs, the molecules developed by the research team have four special features. The molecules assemble to form hollow spherical shells in water. These shells that are ten-millionth of a metre in size can be used as a minuscule container for the drug molecule
The second characteristic is that the molecule has a part (the acetazolamide ligand) that specifically binds to cancer cells and not normal cells
The third feature of the molecule is that it has a photocleavable linker moiety that is responsive to infrared light and breaks the shell during infrared exposure.
The molecules also contain a dye moiety (cyanine-3) which is useful for both fluoresce and scattering-based imaging to visually monitor the entire process
Thus, the molecules developed by the IIT-G researchers self-assemble as capsules to hold the drug, which then attaches only to cancer cells. When infrared light is shone on it, the shell breaks and releases the encapsulated drug into the cancerous cell.
The IIT-G scientists believe that their approach would allow the development of drug carriers for chemotherapy with enhanced efficacy and negligible side effects.
Given that the number of cancer patients in India is anticipated to be 30 million by 2025, the development of effective chemotherapeutic drugs and delivery systems is critical.
The researchers believe that the development of target-specific, light-responsive, self-imaging macro-cyclic lipids such as those developed by them could help in image-guided chemotherapeutic applications.