Cancer patients will no longer suffer side effects thanks to new research

Severe side effects such as hair loss, diarrhea and muscle cramps will be much less severe.

A frightening thing for cancer patients is drug resistance. It will cause tumor cells to self-repair damage caused by chemotherapy. Besides metastasis, drug resistance is the most important challenge for doctors currently treating cancer.

However, scientists are gradually overcoming this situation. A new study by the University of North Carolina, USA indicates that resistant lung cancer cells can be killed by the same drug at a dose of 50 times smaller.

"This is an important finding. It proves to us that in the end, cancer patients can also be treated at smaller doses, achieving greater accuracy , " said Professor Elena Batrakova, who led the study. rescue said. "Treatment results will also be more effective with milder and fewer side effects".

New research is published in Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine.

Treatment of cancer resistant to chemotherapy doses 50 times smaller.

This finding is highly appreciated by the process of killing cancer cells that use the current drugs. Scientists will not have to develop new drugs, which means saving time and cost.

All that Elena Batrakova and the team do is find a way to pack and distribute drugs more effectively to cancer cells. Today's chemotherapy is ineffective mainly because the drug is pumped into a large area of ​​the body. This will kill both cancer cells and other healthy tissues. That is the reason for very serious side effects on the patient's body.

For many years, all scientists have realized this. However, they only focused on packing drugs with nanoparticles. It is a good idea in theory. In fact, the patient's body often recognizes and views nanoparticles as foreign objects. It will work to expel nanoparticles from the body, preventing them from reaching the target of cancer cells.

Simulate an exosome and how they transport substances.

To get rid of this impasse, the University of North Carolina team looked for a new solution. They plan to pack the drug inside the exosomes , small spherical vesicles extracted from the patient's own white blood cells.

" Exosome is essentially a perfect means of transportation , " Batrakova said. "By using exosomes from leukocytes, we can pack the drug in an invisibility cloak, hide it from the immune system. These exosomes crowd around cancer cells, they will release the drug into it. and no drug resistance process occurs ".

To get to this conclusion, scientists used in their experiment paclitaxel, a popular drug for the treatment of breast, lung, and pancreatic cancers. However, it causes formidable side effects such as hair loss, diarrhea and muscle cramps.

Paclitaxel loaded into the exosome is removed from the mice. Later, the researchers placed them on an experimental plate filled with drug-resistant cancer cells. They realized that just 50 times less than the commercial version of paclitaxel was able to achieve effective cell kill.

Drug resistant lung cancer (red) and exosome (green) are crowded around.

Tests on mice were also conducted later. The new method can quickly be effective in mice with drug-resistant lung cancer. Exosome shows that it can also become a highly accurate diagnostic tool for cancer cells.

The next step of the study is that scientists must test exosomes with many different drugs and cancer cells. Finally, a human experiment is an essential step if you want to apply the new method to practice.

It must also be mentioned that in the past, there were also many cancer treatment trials that worked very well in mice, they were not compatible with humans. However, the new method of using exosome is receiving a lot of interest and hope because of its new direction. So let us wait for the next results from Professor Batrakova and colleagues.