Super-sizing a cancer drug minimizes side effects
One of the first chemotherapy drugs given to patients diagnosed with cancer — especially lung, ovarian or breast cancer — is cisplatin, a platinum-containing compound that gums up tumor cells’ DNA. Cisplatin does a good job of killing those tumor cells, but it can also seriously damage the kidneys, which receive high doses of cisplatin because they filter the blood.Now a team of scientists at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) has come up with a new way to package cisplatin into nanoparticles that are too big to enter the kidneys. The new compound could spare patients the usual side effects and allow doctors to administer higher doses of the drug, says Shiladitya Sengupta, leader of the research team.“We could give so much more cisplatin than is now possible,” says Sengupta, an assistant professor of HST. “You could wipe out the tumor by carpet-bombing it.”Tumors in mice...