Advances in nanotechnology's fight against cancer

Dec. 19, 2013 — As cancer maintains its standing as the second leading cause of death in the U.S., researchers have continued their quest for safer and more effective treatments. Among the most promising advances has been the rise of nanomedicine, the application of tiny materials and devices whose sizes are measured in the billionths of a meter to detect, diagnose and treat disease.

A new research review co-authored by a UCLA professor provides one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of research on nanomedicine-based approaches to treating cancer and offers insight into how researchers can best position nanomedicine-based cancer treatments for FDA approval.

The article, by Dean Ho, professor of oral biology and medicine at the UCLA School of Dentistry, and Edward Chow, assistant professor at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and the National University of Singapore, was published online by the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine. Ho and Chow describe the paths that nanotechnology-enabled therapies could take -- and the regulatory and funding obstacles they could encounter -- as they progress through safety and efficacy studies.

"Manufacturing, safety and toxicity studies that will be accepted by the Food and Drug Administration before clinical studies are just some of the considerations that continue to be addressed by the nanomedicine field," said Chow, the paper's co-corresponding author.

Compared with other available therapies, nanomedicine has proven to be especially promising in fighting cancer. In preclinical trials, nanomaterials have produced safer and more effective imaging and drug delivery, and they have enabled researchers to precisely target tumors while sparing patients' healthy tissue. In addition, nanotechnology has significantly improved the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging, making hard-to-find cancers easier to detect.

"A broad spectrum of innovative vehicles is being developed by the cancer nanomedicine community for targeted drug delivery and imaging systems," said Dr. Ho, the paper's corresponding author and co-director of the Jane and Jerry Weintraub Center for Reconstructive Biotechnology at the UCLA School of Dentistry. "It is important to address regulatory issues, overcome manufacturing challenges and outline a strategy for implementing nanomedicine therapies -- both individually and in combination -- to help achieve widespread acceptance for the clinical use of cancer nanomedicine."

Ho's team previously pioneered the development of a nanodiamond-doxorubicin compound named NDX. In preclinical studies conducted with Chow, NDX was found to be safer and more effective than unmodified doxorubicin, a clinical standard, for treating breast, liver and other cancer models.

Ho and Chow's new report features multiple studies in which the use of nanoparticles was translated from the preclinical to the clinical stage. In several of the highlighted studies, nanotechnology-modified drugs showed improvements over conventional, drug-only approaches because of their ability to overcome drug resistance (which occurs when tumors reject the drug and stop responding to treatment), to more effective tumor reduction, among other advantages.

The authors also describe how algorithm-based methods that rapidly determine the best drug combinations, and computation-based methods that draw information from databases of drug interactions and side effects, to help rationally design drug combinations could potentially be paired with nanomedicine to deliver multiple nano-therapies together to further improve the potency and safety of cancer treatments.

"This research review by Dr. Ho and his colleagues lays the groundwork for nanomedicine to become a widely accepted cancer therapy," said Dr. No-Hee Park, dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry. "This blueprint for navigating the process from bench research to mainstream clinical use is invaluable to the nanotechnology community."

Dr. Ho, also a professor of bioengineering and a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and California NanoSystems Institute, noted that nanomedicine regulation is still in its early stages, but the clinical use of existing nanoparticle drugs, such as the protein-modified breast cancer drug Abraxane, is a promising start.

"The FDA's approval of Abraxane provides a strong foundation for the continued acceleration of new cancer nanomedicine therapies and imaging solutions in the fight against cancer," Ho said.

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Alzheimer's brain scan advances

18 September 2013 Last updated at 20:29 ETBy James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Pioneering brain imaging that can detect the build-up of destructive proteins linked to Alzheimer's has been developed by Japanese scientists.

It could lead to new ways of diagnosing the condition and of testing the effectiveness of new drugs.

The technology, reported in the journal Neuron, can identify inside a living brain clumps of a protein called tau that is closely linked to the disease.

Alzheimer's Research UK said it was promising work.

Alzheimer's disease is a problem for researchers trying to come up with a cure. The brain starts to die years before any symptoms are detected, which means drugs are probably given too late.

A diagnosis of Alzheimer's cannot be made with absolute certainty until a patient has died and their brain is examined. It is also not 100% clear what is the cause of the dementia and what are just symptoms.

One protein, called tau, is very closely linked to the disease, with tangles of tau thought to be one way in which brain cells are killed.

The team, lead by the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, used positron emission tomography to build a 3D picture of tau in the brain.

They developed a chemical that could bind to tau and then be detected during a brain scan.

Finding tau in the brain

Tests on mice and people with suspected Alzheimer's showed the technology could detect tau.

Dr Makoto Higuchi, from the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan, said: "Positron emission tomography images of tau accumulation... provide robust information on brain regions developing or at risk for tau-induced neuronal death."

The research is at an early stage, but it could eventually lead to an actual test for Alzheimer's disease.

It might also allow researchers to closely follow the impact drugs that affect tau have on the brain.

Another protein - beta amyloid - is also linked to Alzheimer's and can be detected in similar tests.

Dr Eric Karran, director of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said: "This promising early study highlights a potential new method for detecting tau - a key player in both Alzheimer's and frontotemporal dementia - in the living brain.

"With new drugs in development designed to target tau, scans capable of visualising the protein inside the brain could be important for assessing whether treatments in clinical trials are hitting their target.

"If this method is shown to be effective, such a scan could also be a useful aid for providing people with an accurate diagnosis, as well as for monitoring disease progression."

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Report Sees Continued Advances in War Against Cancer

TUESDAY, Sept. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Nearly 14 million people in the United States, or one in 23, are now cancer survivors.

In comparison, only 3 million people, or one in 69, were cancer survivors in 1971, according to the third annual cancer progress report, issued Tuesday, by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

While there are increasing numbers of cancer patients because some cancers are more common with age, "there is a large increase in the number of survivors," said AACR President Dr. Charles Sawyers. "That's a return on our investment in cancer research."

Sawyers, who chaired the report writing committee, is also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and chair of the human oncology and pathogenesis program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York City.

Other noteworthy advances, Sawyers said, is the approval of 11 new anticancer drugs in the past year alone, which he called "amazing." Also of note is the evolution of immune system modifiers for cancer, such as drugs for certain lymphomas and multiple myeloma, that rev up the immune system to fight the cancer. "Science is paying off, finally," he said.

From 1990 through 2012, more than 1 million lives have been saved from cancer, according to the report.

"The progress is astonishing," said Dr. Cy Stein, a distinguished professor and chair of medical oncology and experimental therapeutics at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif.

"Things have been getting better. That is the truth of this report," said Stein, who is also deputy director of clinical research at City of Hope. He was not involved in the report.

Among the successes noted in the report are that the five-year survival rates for women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer have increased from 75 percent in the mid-1970s to 90 percent or more now.

For children diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, the five-year survival rates have increased from 58 percent to 90 percent or greater during the same time period.

But the progress has not been uniform for all cancers. For instance, the five-year survival rates for some cancers, including the aggressive brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme, as well as liver, lung and pancreatic cancers, have not improved much over more than 40 years, with survival rates of 4 percent to 16 percent.

Despite the progress, more than 1.6 million Americans are expected to be diagnosed with cancer this year and more than 580,000 deaths are expected from cancer in 2013. Experts say the number will increase dramatically in the next two decades, largely due to the aging of the population, and cancer becoming more common with age.

Most cancers are detected in those age 65 and above, and this part of the population is growing quickly.

However, up to 50 percent of cancer deaths are related to preventable causes, including smoking, being obese or overweight, being sedentary and eating a poor diet, the report noted. "The average person would be surprised by how much cancer is preventable, " Sawyers said.

While smoking's link to cancer is well known, he said that many people remain unaware of the obesity-cancer connection. Obesity increases the risk for many cancers, such as esophageal, colorectal, endometrial, kidney and pancreatic cancers, and breast cancers in women past menopause.

Continued progress is jeopardized by the slashing of research funds, the report said. Earlier this year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health's budget was cut by $1.6 billion -- or more than 5 percent.

While the report covers a lot of ground, City of Hope's Stein said the authors didn't emphasize an important fact: "That people with cancer live better."

"A lot of times, even those with advanced cancer on therapy are able to engage in everyday activities," Stein said. "A lot of that is [due to] the research that we did a long time ago that has been paying off for a long time."

More information

To learn more about cancer prevention through living healthy, visit the American Cancer Society.

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