From "Mass High Tech Biz News"
Researchers at MIT are manufacturing tiny artificial viruses out of biodegradeable polymers and injecting them into mice with tumors. The goal is to come up with a treatment for late stage ovarian cancer. And it just might work.
“We’re very excited. We can cure mice. We want to treat people but there are a lot of steps until we get there,” said Daniel Anderson, the lead researcher on the project.
The research is part of the growing field of nanotherapy, a research area that has the potential to create an arsenal of new cancer drugs that attack only the sick cells, leaving the healthy cells alone. It’s a revolution that could some day put an end to the 6 to 8 hours-long chemotherapy infusions, the hair loss and the nausea that are routine for many who battle cancer today.
Ovarian cancer is an elusive therapeutic target. Early detection is rare because the symptoms, like fatigue and abdominal pain, are common to many different illnesses. When a patient is diagnosed, the most common course of treatment is surgery to remove the tumor, followed by chemo. But the tumor often comes back.
Anderson’s treatment involves injecting a nanoparticle, made of an artificial virus and therapeutic DNA, directly into the patient’s peritoneal cavity, which houses organs including the liver, spleen and ovaries. Viruses are good at weaseling their way into cells, so they are a good way to deliver DNA or other therapies in a targeted way, directly into certain cells. But the immune system eventually figures out how to battle real viruses, so Anderson makes his from biodegradeable polymers. The nanoparticle delivers a gene that is engineered to kill cancer cells and leave others alone. Anderson said, “The ultimate goal is for the treatment to replace chemotherapy, but in the early stages we will look toward advancing the treatment as part of a combination therapy.”
MIT’s Anderson and his team are looking to partner with another academic institution to do a Phase 1 clinical trial for their ovarian cancer treatment in humans over the next year to two years. His team has also been in contact with potential corporate partners. The team would then file an Investigational New Drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is the first step in a long regulatory process.
