PNAS: Scientists have developed a new type of injectable therapy for skin cancer

FEBRUARY 5, 2021 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal PNAS, scientists from Yale University and other institutions developed a new skin cancer treatment that uses a two-pronged approach to kill cancer cells by injecting nanoparticles into tumors and as a potential alternative to surgery.
researcher Michael Girardi says that for many patients, treating skin cancer is much more complex than using injections, and finding an easy way to treat skin cancers such as substrate cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma has been a big research challenge for scientists.
In this new treatment, the researchers injected the tumor with a polychemer-based nanoparticle that could carry chemotherapy agents, and the success of the therapy was that the nanoparticles had a certain biological adhesion, that is, they were able to bind to the tumor and absorb it for long periods of time until they were strong enough to kill a large number of cancer cells.
Photo Source: Julia Lewis researchers say that when nanoparticles are injected into a tumor, they stay well in the tumor, accumulating and combining with the tumor substate, so that a one injection lasts a long time and the nanoparticles release compounds.
for comparison, the researchers also freely injected the same drug into tumor tissue without a control model of nanoparticles, and found that when the drug was transported through nanoparticles, the size of the tumor decreased significantly.
key to this therapy is that it can also be combined with a preparation that stimulates the body's immune system. 'We call this phenomenon "killing" and "tremor", and you probably don't just want to kill cells and keep them there, you want to stimulate the immune system to clean up the mess and react to cells that may not have been killed directly, so that's a double whammy of cancer,' said Girardi, a researcher at
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In many cases, removing tumors through injections does not require surgery, which may prevent potential wound infections and other complications, and some patients with other conditions are not suitable for surgery, " he said.
The injection-based treatment means that patients can treat multiple tumors in one visit; saltzman says that in these studies, we only have one injection, which is how we want it to work in clinical practice; our laboratory is very good at nanoparticle research and is committed to optimizing The drug carrying capacity of the particles, as far as possible in a single dose to transport more chemotherapy drugs, because the nanoparticle content is still stuck in the tumor site, so the transport system allows the use of particularly powerful drugs, traditional chemotherapy will affect the whole body, but also produce certain side effects, so the toxicity of the drug is very limited.
The researchers are currently planning to advance preclinical research and development of this technology, followed by clinical trials, and finally, researcher Brian R. Dixon said, "We hope that the results of this paper will hopefully help us develop new treatments for skin cancer in the future."
() Original source: Jamie K. Hu, Hee-Won Suh, Munibah Qureshi, et al. Nonsurgical treatment of skin cancer with local delivery of bioadhesive nanoparticles, PNAS (2020), doi:10.1073/pnas.2020575118