One-two punch knocks out aggressive tumors
An aggressive form of breast cancer known as “triple negative” is very difficult to treat: Chemotherapy can shrink such tumors for a while, but in many patients they grow back and gain resistance to the original drugs. To overcome that resistance, MIT chemical engineers have designed nanoparticles that carry the cancer drug doxorubicin, as well as short strands of RNA that can shut off one of the genes that cancer cells use to escape the drug. This “one-two punch” disables tumors’ defenses and makes them much more vulnerable to chemotherapy.“It gives you, overall, a much more effective system at a lower dose, because you’re able to target these cells and ensure that each and every one of them receives the proper synergistic dosing of the two components,” says Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor in Engineering, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and leader of...