A team of researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden published a paper Monday, July 1, saying they have developed nanorobots that kill cancer cells with a specialized trigger mechanism. The technology, first tested on mice, promises to one day provide a cure for humans.
Nanorobots are microscopic machines that are used to perform tasks too small or delicate for larger devices, and may be more precise and effective than some drugs or other cancer treatments.
Researchers at Karolinska Institute have developed nanostructures called "origami switches" using DNA as the building material. These structures include six peptides (chains of amino acids) assembled in the shape of a hexagon just 10 nanometers in diameter. They act on receptors located on the membranes of all cells, which are called death receptors because when they are triggered, cells die. Cells that continue to grow and don't die are called tumors by scientists.
By hiding death receptors inside the nanorobot, the scientists were able to program it so that the death receptors are activated only when they come into contact with cancer cells. In the course of the experiment, this reduced tumor growth by 70%.
"This hexagonal peptide nanotemplate is becoming a deadly weapon," said study co-author ProfessorBjorn Hogberg of the Karolinska Institute's Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics. "If you administered it as a drug, it would start indiscriminately killing cells in the body, which is not good. To get around this problem, we hid the weapon inside a nanostructure made from DNA."
The mechanism is triggered when the nanobots encounter the more acidic environment characteristic of tumors. Although the study was conducted on mice, they were xenotransplanted with human breast cancer cells. This helps demonstrate that these machines could theoretically work on human cancerous tumors, but much more research needs to be done before they can be marketed.
"At this stage, we have to investigate whether it works on more complex models of cancer that are more similar to real human disease," said the study's first author Yan Wang in a statement. "There is also a need to find out what side effects the method has before it can be tested in humans."