Removable ‘cloak’ for nanoparticles helps them target tumors
MIT chemical engineers have designed a new type of drug-delivery nanoparticle that exploits a trait shared by almost all tumors: They are more acidic than healthy tissues. Such particles could target nearly any type of tumor, and can be designed to carry virtually any type of drug, says Paula Hammond, a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the particles in the journal ACS Nano. Like most other drug-delivering nanoparticles, the new MIT particles are cloaked in a polymer layer that protects them from being degraded by the bloodstream. However, the MIT team, including lead author and postdoctoral associate Zhiyong Poon, designed this outer layer to fall off after entering the slightly more acidic environment near a tumor. That reveals another layer that is able to penetrate individual tumor cells.In the ACS Nano paper, which went online...