Researchers successfully tested a form of anti-cancer drug delivery by using a patient’s own platelets to disguise the drug as part of their bloodstream, which helps shrink tumors and keep cancer from spreading throughout the body.
A joint biomedical engineering team between NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill developed the treatment with the main goal of creating a drug delivery system that mimics the body’s natural processes.
Platelets are a type of blood cell that exists in our body to help blood clot and stop bleeding by clumping together whenever there is an injury to a blood vessel. Platelets also play a vital role in how cancer spreads from one part of the body to another.
“Platelets can aggregate on the surface of circulating tumor cells and help them survive in the blood streams and migrate to other sites for tumor development,” said Quanyin Hu, a graduate student and lead author of a paper on the team’s work.
The surface of cancer cells are likely to stick to platelets and be carried throughout the body via the bloodstream, thus spreading the cancer in a process known as metastasis.
The team decided to take advantage of this affinity between platelets and cancer cells. By extracting the membranes of platelets obtained from mice, it was able to create the platelet membrane-coated nanovehicle (PM-NV), which was the anticancer drug disguised by this outer layer of platelets. The team hypothesized that the PM-NV would be able to target the tumor sites and deliver the anticancer therapeutics to their most active destinations. This could both destroy existing tumors and stop new tumors before they start.
Another advantage to this method is that by coating the anti-cancer drug with the body’s own platelets, the drug-carriers wouldn’t be identified as foreign objects, so the body would not go into an immune response and try to eliminate them. The drug stays in the bloodstream longer, averaging about 30 hours with this platelet-membrane coating compared to about six hours without it.
After a year of testing their research on mice, the researchers found that using the anticancer drugs known as Dox and TRAIL in the PM-NV drug delivery system was significantly better at reducing large tumors and destroying circulating tumor cells than using Dox and TRAIL without the coating of platelets.
“This is the first time to use the platelet membrane-coated synthetic nanoparticles for anticancer treatment,” Hu said.
Hu said this research is significant to cancer research because they have now found a successful way that an anticancer drug was able to inhibit the metastatic development of cancerous cells. In the future this means the PM-NV treatment could help people be completely rid of cancer more effectively and efficiently.
“The next steps will be additional pre-clinical testing of this platform in large animals, as well as using this platform to treat other diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and inflammation,” Hu said.
In an interview with NC State News, Zhen Gu, the corresponding author of the research paper, said, “We think it could be used to deliver other drugs, such as those targeting cardiovascular disease, in which the platelet membrane could help us target relevant sites in the body.”
With additional pre-clinical testing on the platform on large animals and eventually in humans, if proven to be successful, this technique could speed up the recovery of some of the most significant medical diseases affecting the human body.